18.9 Outlook Planning (Jan 12 - Feb 13 2026)

This is the current outlook for the 18.9 milestone. The Geo team schedules issues and works in a continuous Kanban manner, while still aligning with milestones. See our process page for more details.

Last Updated: 14th January 2026

Migration Cohort 1 to Protocell

This epic represents the work needed to achieve our first major delivery milestone of the Protocells Code Yellow initiative. We plan to migrate select inactive namespaces (Cohort 1) from the gitlab.com legacy cell to our first production cell (the Protocell).

Organization Data Migration

Instead of focusing on Cells 1.0, 1.5, and 2.0 for the near term we will work on offloading that 50%+ (other) that is not our top 50 namespaces. We'll have different cohorts to migrate, starting with inactive users all the way to users using application. The more features Cells support the larger/more customers we can migrate. We've reduced scope from the original design for Org Mover and renamed to Organization Data Migration for Protocells.

Organization data migration is a critical component of multi-cell architecture, enabling the movement of entire organizations from one cell to another while maintaining data integrity and minimizing downtime.

The migration process involves replicating PostgreSQL data, Git repositories, object storage files, and container registry data from a source cell to a destination cell, with various implementation strategies ranging from automated replication systems to manual migration processes.

This approach repurposes existing Geo replication infrastructure to handle organization migration. By configuring the destination cell as a temporary Geo secondary site, we can leverage proven replication mechanisms while minimizing custom development.

If we disable Geo configuration in Protocells, then we can more easily configure the Protocell to act as a secondary Geo site without a lot of modifications.

Organization migration: Modifying Geo for Proto... (gitlab-org&14631)

Who: Mike, Natanael, Douglas, Scott

Geo already has "Selective sync by namespace". Extend this to add "Selective sync by organization".

We will use this to scope and run checksumming on selected organizations on the legacy cell.

Besides selective checksumming by org, this work effectively also implements selective sync by org. They both depend on the same scopes on the source cell/site to determine "what needs to be checksummed or synced".

Geo Improve Observability priority2

Who: Chloe, Victor

In order to support Cells and Org Mover, current Geo functionality for replication and verification especially surfaced in the UI needs improvement and better observability. The goals we want to achieve with this epic are:

Dedicated Asks

Misc

Customer Support Triage DRIs

Jan 12 - 16 Mike

Jan 19-30 Natanael

Feb 2 - 13 Ian

PTO

Lucie Jan 23-26

Mike Jan 19

Ian Jan 19

Edited by Lucie Zhao