不落后的版本：我们GitLab升级的史诗之旅

In a tech-driven field, staying updated isn’t an option—it’s essential. At Grab, we’re committed to providing top-notch technology services. However, keeping pace can be demanding. At one point in time, our GitLab instance was trailing by roughly 14 months of releases. This blog post recounts our experience updating and formulating a consistent upgrade routine.

在技术驱动的领域，保持更新不是选择，而是必要的。在Grab，我们致力于提供一流的技术服务。然而，跟上步伐可能是一项艰巨的任务。曾经有一段时间，我们的GitLab实例滞后了大约14个月的发布。本博客文章记录了我们更新和制定一致的升级例程的经验。

Recognising the need to upgrade

认识到升级的必要性

Our team, while skilled, was still learning GitLab’s complexities. Regular stability issues left us little time for necessary upgrades. Understanding the importance of upgrades for our operations to get latest patches for important security fixes and vulnerabilities, we started preparing for GitLab updates while managing system stability. This meant a quick learning and careful approach to updates.

我们的团队虽然技术娴熟，但仍在学习GitLab的复杂性。经常出现的稳定性问题给我们留下了很少的时间进行必要的升级。我们理解升级对我们的运营至关重要，以获取最新的补丁和重要的安全修复和漏洞，因此我们开始在管理系统稳定性的同时准备GitLab的更新。这意味着我们需要快速学习和谨慎对待更新。

The following image illustrates the version discrepancy between our self-hosted GitLab instance and the official most recent release of GitLab as of July 2022. GitLab follows a set release schedule, issuing one minor update monthly and rolling out a major upgrade annually.

以下图片展示了我们自托管的GitLab实例与截至2022年7月的官方最新版本GitLab之间的版本差异。GitLab遵循一套发布计划，每月发布一个次要更新，并每年推出一个主要升级。

Fig 1. The difference between our hosted version and the latest available GitLab version by 22 July 2022

图1. 我们托管版本与截至2022年7月22日最新可用的GitLab版本之间的差异

We were concerned about potential downtime, data integrity, and the threat of encountering unforeseen issues. GitLab is critical for the daily activities of Grab engineers. It serves a critical user base of thousands of engineers actively using it, hosting multiple mono repositories with code bases ranging in size from 1GB to a sizable 15GB. When taking into account all its artefacts, the overall imprint of a monorepo can extend to an impressive 39TB.

我们担心可能的停...