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Does Gitlab support some kind of federation between instances?

If so, they could (in theory) split Gitlab.com into a bunch shards which as a whole match the properties of N% of enterprise users. That'd be a pretty cool way to avoid the different-in-scale problem (although you might still run into novel problems as you're now the Gitlab instance with the most shards..).

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this is what Salesforce does - they have publicly visible shards in the url (na11, na14, eu23, etc) and login.salesforce.com redirects you to your shard when it figures out who you are.

For anyone considering this, reconsider. It bit me many times.

In general, over time, load on some shards will increase while others decrease. Migrating a customer from one shard to another will likley cause a short outage for them, and many bugs down the line when they've bookmarked all kinds of things.

could that not be resolved with a reverse proxy or load balancer trickery? ie; hide the shard name externally.

You need to preserve the name<->customer association and maintain another key that you can use to split traffic at the LB in case a customer outgrows their shard. But personally I think it looks hokey and should not be something a customer sees anywhere but perhaps a developer tool or sniffer.

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