[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":813},["ShallowReactive",2],{"/en-us/blog/exact-code-search-find-code-faster-across-repositories":3,"navigation-en-us":34,"banner-en-us":444,"footer-en-us":454,"blog-post-authors-en-us-Dmitry Gruzd":696,"blog-related-posts-en-us-exact-code-search-find-code-faster-across-repositories":710,"blog-promotions-en-us":750,"next-steps-en-us":803},{"id":4,"title":5,"authorSlugs":6,"body":8,"categorySlug":9,"config":10,"content":14,"description":8,"extension":25,"isFeatured":11,"meta":26,"navigation":27,"path":28,"publishedDate":20,"seo":29,"stem":30,"tagSlugs":31,"__hash__":33},"blogPosts/en-us/blog/exact-code-search-find-code-faster-across-repositories.yml","Exact Code Search Find Code Faster Across Repositories",[7],"dmitry-gruzd",null,"product",{"featured":11,"template":12,"slug":13},false,"BlogPost","exact-code-search-find-code-faster-across-repositories",{"title":15,"description":16,"authors":17,"heroImage":19,"date":20,"body":21,"category":9,"tags":22},"Exact Code Search: Find code faster across repositories","Discover how this new GitLab feature can find exact matches, use regex patterns, and see contextual results across terabytes of codebases.",[18],"Dmitry Gruzd","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749675154/Blog/Hero%20Images/blog-image-template-1800x945__8_.png","2025-06-25","**TL;DR:** What if you could find any line of code across 48 TB of repositories in milliseconds? GitLab's new [Exact Code\nSearch](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/search/exact_code_search.html) makes this possible, delivering pinpoint precision, powerful regex support, and contextual multi-line results that transform how teams work with large codebases.\n\n## Why traditional code search is challenging\n\nAnyone who works with code knows the frustration of searching across repositories. Whether you're a developer debugging an issue, a DevOps engineer examining configurations, a security analyst searching for vulnerabilities, a technical writer updating documentation, or a manager reviewing implementation, you know exactly what you need, but traditional search tools often fail you.\n\nThese conventional tools return dozens of false positives, lack the context needed to understand results, and slow to a crawl as codebases grow. The result? Valuable time spent hunting for needles in haystacks instead of building, securing, or improving your software.\n\nGitLab's code search functionality has historically been backed by Elasticsearch or OpenSearch. While these are excellent for searching issues, merge requests, comments, and other data containing natural language, they weren't specifically designed for code. After [evaluating numerous options](https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/7404), we developed a better solution.\n\n## Introducing Exact Code Search: Three game-changing capabilities\n\nEnter GitLab's **[Exact Code Search](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/search/exact_code_search.html)**, currently in beta testing and powered by [Zoekt](https://github.com/sourcegraph/zoekt) (pronounced \"zookt\", Dutch for \"search\"). Zoekt is an open-source code search engine originally created by Google and now maintained by Sourcegraph, specifically designed for fast, accurate code search at scale. We've enhanced it with GitLab-specific integrations, enterprise-scale improvements, and seamless permission system integration.\n\nThis feature revolutionizes how you find and understand code with three key capabilities:\n\n1. Exact Match mode: Zero false positives\n\nWhen toggled to **Exact Match mode**, the search engine returns only results that match your query exactly as entered, eliminating false positives. This precision is invaluable when:\n\n* Searching for specific error messages\n\n* Looking for particular function signatures\n\n* Finding instances of specific variable names\n2. Regular Expression mode: Powerful pattern matching\n\nFor complex search needs, Regular Expression mode allows you to craft sophisticated search patterns:\n\n* Find functions following specific naming patterns\n\n* Locate variables matching certain constraints\n\n* Identify potential security vulnerabilities using pattern matching\n\n3. Multiple-line matches: See code in context\n\n\n![Exact Code Search](https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1750704179/ttjuilkt3v7gtyywnchx.png)\n\nInstead of seeing just a single line with your matching term, you get the surrounding context that's crucial for understanding the code. This eliminates the need to click through to files for basic comprehension, significantly accelerating your workflow.\n\n## From features to workflows: Real-world use cases and impact\n\nLet's see how these capabilities translate to real productivity gains in everyday development scenarios:\n\n### Debugging: From error message to root cause in seconds\n\nBefore Exact Code Search:\n\nCopy an error message, search, wade through dozens of partial matches in comments and documentation, click through multiple files, and eventually find the actual code.\n\nWith Exact Code Search:\n\n1. Copy the exact error message\n\n2. Paste it into Exact Code Search with Exact Match mode\n\n3. Instantly find the precise location where the error is thrown, with surrounding context\n\n**Impact:** Reduce debugging time from minutes to seconds, eliminating the frustration of false positives.\n\n### Code exploration: Master unfamiliar codebases quickly\n\nBefore Exact Code Search:\n\nBrowse through directories, make educated guesses about file locations, open dozens of files, and slowly build a mental map of the codebase.\n\nWith Exact Code Search:\n\n* Search for key methods or classes with Exact Match mode\n\n* Review multiple line matches to understand implementation details\n\n* Use Regular Expression mode to find similar patterns across the codebase\n\n**Impact:** Build a mental map of code structure in minutes rather than hours, dramatically accelerating onboarding and cross-team collaboration.\n\n### Refactoring with confidence\n\nBefore Exact Code Search:\n\nAttempt to find all instances of a method, miss some occurrences, and introduce bugs through incomplete refactoring.\n\nWith Exact Code Search:\n\n* Use Exact Match mode to find all occurrences of methods or variables\n\n* Review context to understand usage patterns\n\n* Plan your refactoring with complete information about impact\n\n**Impact:** Eliminate the \"missed instance\" bugs that often plague refactoring efforts, improving code quality and reducing rework.\n\n### Security auditing: Finding vulnerable patterns\n\nSecurity teams can:\n\n* Create regex patterns matching known vulnerable code\n\n* Search across all repositories in a namespace\n\n* Quickly identify potential security issues with context that helps assess risk\n\n**Impact:** Transform security audits from manual, error-prone processes to systematic, comprehensive reviews.\n\n### Cross-repository insights\n\nSearch across your entire namespace or instance to:\n\n* Identify similar implementations across different projects\n\n* Discover opportunities for shared libraries or standardization\n\n**Impact:** Break down silos between projects and identify opportunities for code reuse and standardization.\n\n## The technical foundation: How Zoekt delivers speed and precision\n\nBefore diving into our scale achievements, let's explore what makes Zoekt fundamentally different from traditional search engines — and why it can find exact matches so incredibly fast.\n\n### Positional trigrams: The secret to lightning-fast exact matches\n\nZoekt's speed comes from its use of **positional trigrams** — a technique that indexes every sequence of three characters along with their exact positions in files. This approach solves one of the biggest pain points developers have had with Elasticsearch-based code search: false positives.\n\nHere's how it works:\n\n**Traditional full-text search engines** like Elasticsearch tokenize code into words and lose positional information. When you search for `getUserId()`, they might return results containing **user**, **get**, and **Id** scattered throughout a file — leading to those frustrating false positives for GitLab users.\n\n**Zoekt's positional trigrams** maintain exact character sequences and their positions. When you search for `getUserId()`, Zoekt doesn't check all possible trigrams. Instead, it intelligently selects just **2 trigrams** with the lowest frequency (least common in the codebase) — for example, **get** and **d()** — and ensures they appear at the correct distance apart (distance 8 in this case). This optimization strategy dramatically reduces the number of candidate matches while ensuring only exact matches are returned.\n\nThe result? Search queries that previously returned hundreds of irrelevant results now return only the precise matches you're looking for. This was [one of our most requested features](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/325234) for good reason - developers were losing significant time sifting through false positives.\n\n### Regular expression performance at scale\n\nZoekt excels at exact matches and is optimized for regular expression searches. The engine uses sophisticated algorithms to convert regex patterns into efficient trigram queries when possible, maintaining speed even for complex patterns across terabytes of code.\n\n## Built for enterprise scale\n\nExact Code Search is powerful and built to handle massive scale with impressive performance. This is not just a new UI feature — it's powered by a completely reimagined backend architecture.\n\n### Handling terabytes of code with ease\n\nOn GitLab.com alone, our Exact Code Search infrastructure indexes and searches over **48 TB** of code data while maintaining lightning-fast response times. This scale represents millions of repositories across thousands of namespaces, all searchable within milliseconds. To put this in perspective: This scale represents more code than the entire Linux kernel, Android, and Chromium projects combined. Yet Exact Code Search can find a specific line across this massive codebase in milliseconds.\n\n### Self-registering node architecture\n\nOur innovative implementation features:\n\n* **Automatic node registration:** Zoekt nodes register themselves with GitLab\n\n* **Dynamic shard assignment:** The system automatically assigns namespaces to nodes\n\n* **Health monitoring:** Nodes that don't check in are automatically marked offline\n\nThis self-configuring architecture dramatically simplifies scaling. When more capacity is needed, administrators can simply add more nodes without complex reconfiguration.\n\n### Distributed system with intelligent load balancing\n\nBehind the scenes, Exact Code Search operates as a distributed system with these key components:\n\n* **Specialized search nodes:** Purpose-built servers that handle indexing and searching\n\n* **Smart sharding:** Code is distributed across nodes based on namespaces\n\n* **Automatic load balancing:** The system intelligently distributes work based on capacity\n\n* **High availability:** Multiple replicas ensure continuous operation even if nodes fail\n\n*Note: High availability is built into the architecture but not yet fully enabled. See [Issue 514736](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/514736) for updates.*\n\n### Seamless security integration\n\nExact Code Search automatically integrates with GitLab's permission system:\n\n* Search results are filtered based on the user's access rights\n\n* Only code from projects the user has access to is displayed\n\n* Security is built into the core architecture, not added as an afterthought\n\n### Optimized performance\n\n* **Efficient indexing:** Large repositories are indexed in tens of seconds\n\n* **Fast query execution:** Most searches return results with sub-second response times\n\n* **Streaming results:** The new gRPC-based federated search streams results as they're found\n\n* **Early termination:** Once enough results are collected, the system pauses searching\n\n## From library to distributed system: Engineering challenges we solved\n\nWhile Zoekt provided the core search technology, it was originally designed as a minimal library for managing `.zoekt` index files - not a distributed database or enterprise-scale service. Here are the key engineering challenges we overcame to make it work at GitLab's scale\"\n\n### Challenge 1: Building an orchestration layer\n\n**The problem:** Zoekt was designed to work with local index files, not distributed across multiple nodes serving many concurrent users.\n\n**Our solution:** We built a comprehensive orchestration layer that:\n\n* Creates and manages database models to track nodes, indices, repositories, and tasks\n\n* Implements a self-registering node architecture (inspired by GitLab Runner)\n\n* Handles automatic shard assignment and load balancing across nodes\n\n* Provides bidirectional API communication between GitLab Rails and Zoekt nodes\n\n### Challenge 2: Scaling storage and indexing\n\n**The problem:** How do you efficiently manage terabytes of index data across multiple nodes while ensuring fast updates?\n\n**Our solution:** We implemented:\n\n* Intelligent sharding: Namespaces are distributed across nodes based on capacity and load\n\n* Independent replication: Each node independently indexes from [Gitaly](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitaly) (our Git storage service), eliminating complex synchronization\n\n* Watermark management: Sophisticated storage allocation that prevents nodes from running out of space\n\n* Unified binary architecture: A single `gitlab-zoekt` binary that can operate in both indexer and webserver modes\n\n### Challenge 3: Permission Integration\n\n**The problem:** Zoekt had no concept of GitLab's complex permission system - users should only see results from projects they can access.\n\n**Our solution:** We built native permission filtering directly into the search flow:\n\n* Search requests include user permission context\n\n* Results are filtered to include only those the user can access in case permissions change before indexing completes\n\n### Challenge 4: Operational simplicity\n\n**The problem:** Managing a distributed search system shouldn't require a dedicated team.\n\n**Our solution:**\n\n* Auto-scaling: Adding capacity is as simple as deploying more nodes - they automatically register and start handling work\n\n* Self-healing: Nodes that don't check in are automatically marked offline and their work redistributed\n\n* Zero-configuration sharding: The system automatically determines optimal shard assignments\n\n## Gradual rollout: Minimizing risk at scale\n\nRolling out a completely new search backend to millions of users required careful planning. Here's how we minimized customer impact while ensuring reliability:\n\n### Phase 1: Controlled testing (gitlab-org group)\n\nWe started by enabling Exact Code Search only for the `gitlab-org` group - our own internal repositories. This allowed us to:\n\n* Test the system with real production workloads\n\n* Identify and fix performance bottlenecks\n\n* Streamline the deployment process\n\n* Learn from real users' workflows and feedback\n\n### Phase 2: Performance validation and optimization\n\nBefore expanding, we focused on ensuring the system could handle GitLab.com's scale:\n\n* Implemented comprehensive monitoring and alerting\n\n* Validated storage management with real production data growth\n\n### Phase 3: Incremental customer expansion\n\nWe gradually expanded to customers interested in testing Exact Code Search:\n\n* Gathered feedback on performance and user experience\n\n* Refined the search UI based on real user workflows\n\n* Optimized indexing performance (large repositories like `gitlab-org/gitlab` now index in ~10 seconds)\n\n* Refined the architecture based on operational learnings\n\n* Massively increased indexing throughput and improved state transition livecycle\n\n### Phase 4: Broad rollout\n\nToday, over 99% of Premium and Ultimate licensed groups on GitLab.com have access to Exact Code Search. Users can:\n\n* Toggle between regex and exact search modes\n\n* Experience the benefits without any configuration changes\n\n* Fall back to the previous search if needed (though few choose to)\n\nRolling this out gradually meant users didn't experience service disruptions, performance degradation, or feature gaps during the transition. We've already received positive feedback from users as they notice their results becoming more relevant and faster.\n\n> **For technical deep dive:** Interested in the detailed architecture and implementation? Check out our comprehensive [design document](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/architecture/design-documents/code_search_with_zoekt/) for in-depth technical details about how we built this distributed search system.\n\n## Getting started with Exact Code Search\n\nGetting started with Exact Code Search is simple because it's already enabled by default for Premium and Ultimate groups on GitLab.com (over 99% of eligible groups currently have access).\n\n### Quickstart guide\n\n1. Navigate to the Advanced Search in your GitLab project or group\n\n2. Enter your search term in the code tab\n\n3. Toggle between Exact Match and Regular Expression modes\n\n4. Use filters to refine your search\n\n### Basic search syntax\n\nWhether using Exact Match or Regular Expression mode, you can refine your search with modifiers:\n\n| Query Example | What It Does                                             |\n| ------------- | -------------------------------------------------------- |\n| `file:js`     | Searches only in files containing \"js\" in their name     |\n| `foo -bar`    | Finds \"foo\" but excludes results with \"bar\"              |\n| `lang:ruby`   | Searches only in Ruby files                              |\n| `sym:process` | Finds \"process\" in symbols (methods, classes, variables) |\n\n> **Pro Tip:** For the most efficient searches, start specific and then broaden if needed. Using `file:` and `lang:` filters dramatically increases relevance.\n\n### Advanced search techniques\n\nStack multiple filters for precision:\n\n```text\nis_expected file:rb -file:spec\n```\n\nThis finds \"is_expected\" in Ruby files that don't have \"spec\" in their name.\n\nUse regular expressions for powerful patterns:\n\n```text\ntoken.*=.*[\\\"']\n```\n\n[Watch this search performed against the GitLab Zoekt repository.](https://gitlab.com/search?search=token.*%3D.*%5B%5C%22'%5D&nav_source=navbar&project_id=46649240&group_id=9970&search_code=true&repository_ref=main&regex=true)\n\nThe search helps find hardcoded passwords, which, if not found, can be a security issue.\n\nFor more detailed syntax information, check the [Exact Code Search documentation](https://docs.gitlab.com/user/search/exact_code_search/#syntax).\n\n## Availability and deployment\n\n### Current availability\n\nExact Code Search is currently in Beta for GitLab.com users with Premium and Ultimate licenses:\n\n* Available for over 99% of licensed groups\n\n* Search in the UI automatically uses Zoekt when available, Exact Code Search in Search API is behind a feature flag\n\n### Self-managed deployment options\n\nFor self-managed instances, we offer several deployment methods:\n\n* Kubernetes/Helm: Our most well-supported method, using our [`gitlab-zoekt` Helm chart](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/cloud-native/charts/gitlab-zoekt)\n\n* Other deployment options: We're working on streamlining deployment for Omnibus and other installation methods\n\nSystem requirements depend on your codebase size, but the architecture is designed to scale horizontally and/or vertically as your needs grow.\n\n## What's coming next\n\nWhile Exact Code Search is already powerful, we're continuously improving it:\n\n* **Scale optimizations** to support instances with hundreds of thousands of repositories\n\n* **Improved self-managed deployment** options, including streamlined Omnibus support\n\n* **Full high availability support** with automatic failover and load balancing\n\nStay tuned for updates as we move from Beta to General Availability.\n\n## Transform how you work with code\n\nGitLab's Exact Code Search represents a fundamental rethinking of code discovery. By delivering exact matches, powerful regex support, and contextual results, it solves the most frustrating aspects of code search:\n\n* No more wasting time with irrelevant results\n\n* No more missing important matches\n\n* No more clicking through files just to understand basic context\n\n* No more performance issues as codebases grow\n\nThe impact extends beyond individual productivity:\n\n* **Teams collaborate better** with easy code referencing\n\n* **Knowledge sharing accelerates** when patterns are discoverable\n\n* **Onboarding becomes faster** with quick codebase comprehension\n\n* **Security improves** with effective pattern auditing\n\n* **Technical debt reduction** becomes more feasible\n\nExact Code Search isn't just a feature, it's a better way to understand and work with code. Stop searching and start finding.\n\n**We'd love to hear from you!** Share your experiences, questions, or feedback about Exact Code Search in our [feedback issue](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/420920). Your input helps us prioritize improvements and new features.\n\n> Ready to experience smarter code search? Learn more in our [documentation](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/search/exact_code_search.html) or try it now by performing a search in your Premium or Ultimate licensed namespaces or projects. Not a GitLab user yet? 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Patch Release: 18.11.1, 18.10.4, 18.9.6","Discover what's in this latests patch release.","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749661926/Blog/Hero%20Images/security-patch-blog-image-r2-0506-700x400-fy25_2x.jpg","2026-04-22",[718,719],"patch releases","security releases",{"featured":11,"template":12,"externalUrl":721},"https://docs.gitlab.com/releases/patches/patch-release-gitlab-18-11-1-released/",{"content":723,"config":735},{"title":724,"description":725,"body":726,"category":9,"tags":727,"date":730,"authors":731,"heroImage":734},"GitLab + Amazon: Platform orchestration on a trusted AI foundation","Pair GitLab Duo Agent Platform with Amazon Bedrock for agentic software development and orchestration.","If your team runs GitLab and has a strong AWS practice, a new combination of Duo Agent Platform and Amazon Bedrock is just for you. The model is simple: GitLab acts as your orchestration layer to help accelerate your entire software lifecycle with agentic AI, and Bedrock is designed to provide a secure, compliant foundation model layer with AI inference behind the scenes.\n\nGitLab Duo Agent Platform enables you to handle planning, merge pipelines, security scanning, vulnerability remediation, and more as part of your GitLab workflows, while the GitLab AI Gateway routes model calls to Bedrock (or GitLab-managed Bedrock-backed endpoints, depending on your setup). That means you can build on the identity and access management (IAM) policies, virtual private cloud (VPC) boundaries, regional controls, and cloud spend commitments you already have in AWS.\n\nIf you already use Amazon Bedrock and want AI to help inside the work you already do in GitLab, not in yet another standalone chat tool, this is the pairing for you.\n\n\nIn this article, we look at the real problem many teams face today: AI is fragmented, data paths are fuzzy, and Bedrock investment gets underused when AI sits outside the software development lifecycle. Then we break down your deployment options for GitLab Duo Agent Platform:\n\n* Integrated with self-hosted models on Amazon Bedrock for GitLab Self-Managed deployments and self-hosted AI gateway   \n* Integrated with GitLab-operated models on Amazon Bedrock (with GitLab-owned keys) for GitLab Self-Managed deployments and GitLab-hosted AI gateway  \n* Integrated with GitLab-operated models on Amazon Bedrock (with GitLab-owned keys) for GitLab.com instances and GitLab-hosted AI gateway\n\nWe wrap with a summary on how this approach helps avoid shadow AI and point-tool sprawl without creating a parallel tech stack for AI tooling.\n\n## AI everywhere, control nowhere\n\nSomewhere in your company right now, software teams might be using an AI tool that your security team hasn't approved. Prompt data might be leaving your environment through a path no one has fully mapped. And your organization’s Amazon Bedrock investment might be underused while individual teams expense separate AI tools, pulling workloads and cloud spend away from the platforms you’ve already committed to.\n\nInstead of being a people problem, this might be an architecture problem. And it surfaces the same three constraints in nearly every enterprise:\n\n**Operational fragmentation.** Each team, or sometimes even an individual developer, picks their own development toolset, including AI tooling and model selection. That fragmentation makes end-to-end governance within the software development lifecycle nearly impossible.\n\n**Security and sovereignty.** Where does prompt and code data actually flow? Who owns the logs?\n\n**Cloud spend optimization.** Commitments to key cloud providers like AWS are diluted as workloads and AI usage drift to point tools outside of customers’ existing agreements.\n\nGitLab Duo Agent Platform and Amazon Bedrock help solve this together. The division of labor is straightforward: Duo Agent Platform owns the workflow orchestration with agentic AI for software development, Bedrock owns the inference layer and hosts approved foundational models, and your organization has full control over the data and policy boundaries you already defined in AWS. Three jobs, three owners, no fragmentation.\n\n## GitLab Duo Agent Platform: The agentic control plane\n\nGitLab Duo Agent Platform is GitLab's agentic AI layer: a framework of specialized agents and flows that operate simultaneously and in-parallel, going beyond the traditional stage-based handoffs  and helping automate work across the entire software lifecycle. Rather than a single assistant responding to prompts, Duo Agent Platform enables teams to orchestrate many AI agents asynchronously using unified data and project context, including issues, merge requests, pipelines, and security findings. Linear workflows are turned into coordinated, continuous collaboration between software teams and their AI agents, at scale.\n\nWith that control plane in place, the natural next question is which AI foundation should power these agents. For customers who run GitLab Self-Managed on AWS and need inference traffic, prompt data, and logs to also stay within their AWS environment along with their software lifecycle data, Amazon Bedrock acting as the AI inference layer is the natural fit. \n\n## Amazon Bedrock: The trusted AI foundation\n\nAmazon Bedrock is a fully managed, serverless foundation model layer that runs entirely within your AWS environment. Customer data stays in the customer's AWS account: inputs and outputs are encrypted in transit and at rest, never shared with model providers, and never used to train base models. Bedrock carries compliance certifications across GDPR, HIPAA, and FedRAMP High, covering many regulated industry requirements out of the box. Teams can also bring fine-tuned models from elsewhere via Custom Model Import and deploy them alongside native Bedrock models through the same infrastructure, without managing separate deployment pipelines. Bedrock Guardrails adds configurable safeguards across all models for content filtering, hallucination detection, and sensitive data protection.\n\nTogether, GitLab Duo Agent Platform and Bedrock consolidate DevSecOps orchestration and AI model governance, helping eliminate the fragmentation that happens when teams roll out AI tools independently.\n\n## Choosing your deployment path\n\nThe integration delivers the same core GitLab Duo Agent Platform capabilities regardless of how it is deployed. What varies is who runs GitLab, who operates the AI Gateway, and whose Bedrock account the inference runs through. The right pattern depends on where your organization already operates.\n\nAt a high level, the integration has three main components:\n\n* **GitLab Duo Agent Platform:** agentic workflows embedded across the software development lifecycle  \n* **AI Gateway (GitLab-managed or self-hosted):** the abstraction layer between Duo Agent Platform and the foundational model backend   \n* **Amazon Bedrock:** the AI model and inference substrate\n\n![Deployment of GitLab and AWS Bedrock](https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1776362365/udmvmv2efpmwtkxgydch.png)\n\nChoosing a deployment pattern is informed by where an organization wants to place the levers of control. The patterns below are designed to meet teams where they already are, whether that's SaaS-first, self-managed for compliance, or all-in on AWS with existing Bedrock investments.\n\n| Deployment Model | GitLab.com instance with GitLab-hosted AI Gateway with GitLab-operated Bedrock models   | GitLab Self-Managed with GitLab-hosted AI Gateway with GitLab-operated Bedrock models | GitLab Self-Managed  with self-hosted AI Gateway and customer-operated Bedrock models |\n| :---- | :---- | :---- | :---- |\n| **Ideal if you:** | Are primarily on GitLab.com and don’t want to self-host AI gateway and Bedrock models  | Need GitLab Self-Managed for compliance and operational reasons but don’t want to manage AI layer | Are AWS-centric with existing Bedrock usage and strict data/control needs  |\n| **Key Benefits** | Fastest, turnkey way to get Duo Agent Platform workflows: GitLab runs GitLab.com, the AI Gateway, integrated with Bedrock AI models. | Keep GitLab deployed in your own environment while consuming Bedrock models via a GitLab-managed AI Gateway, combining deployment control with simplified AI operations. | Run GitLab and AI Gateway in your AWS account, reuse existing IAM/VPC/regions, keep logs and data in your environment, and draw Bedrock usage from your existing AWS spend commitments. |\n\n## How customers use GitLab Duo Agent Platform with Amazon Bedrock\n\nPlatform teams can use GitLab Duo Agent Platform with Amazon Bedrock to standardize which models handle code suggestions, security analysis, and pipeline remediation. This helps enforce guardrails and logging centrally rather than letting individual teams adopt separate tools independently.\n\nSecurity workflows see particular benefit. GitLab Duo Agent Platform agents can propose and validate fixes for security findings within GitLab, helping reduce the manual triage work developers would otherwise handle outside the platform.\n\nFor enterprises already committed to AWS, routing AI workloads through Bedrock from within GitLab enables you to keep developer AI usage aligned with existing cloud agreements rather than generating separate, unplanned spend.\n\n## Closing the loop\n\nThe constraints that slow enterprise AI adoption are often not technical. They are organizational: fragmented tooling, ungoverned data flows, and cloud spend that never consolidates. Those are the problems that can stall AI programs even after the pilots succeed.\n\nGitLab Duo Agent Platform and Amazon Bedrock help address each one directly. Platform teams get consistent governance, auditability, and standardized paths for AI usage across the software development lifecycle. Development teams get streamlined, agentic workflows that feel native to GitLab. And AWS-centric organizations get to extend their existing Bedrock investment rather than build parallel AI infrastructure alongside it.\n\nThe result is an AI program that scales without fragmenting. Governance and velocity on the same stack, serving the same teams, under policies the organization already owns.\n\n\n> To explore which deployment pattern is right for your organization and how to align GitLab Duo Agent Platform and Amazon Bedrock with your existing AWS strategy, [contact the GitLab sales team](https://about.gitlab.com/sales/) and we’ll help you design and implement the best architecture for your environment. You can also [visit our AWS partner page](https://about.gitlab.com/partners/technology-partners/aws/) to learn more.",[271,728,729],"AWS","AI/ML","2026-04-21",[732,733],"Joe Mann","Mark Kriaf","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1776362275/ozbwn9tk0dditpnfddlz.png",{"featured":27,"template":12,"slug":736},"gitlab-amazon-platform-orchestration-on-a-trusted-ai-foundation",{"content":738,"config":748},{"title":739,"description":740,"authors":741,"heroImage":743,"date":744,"body":745,"category":9,"tags":746},"GitLab 18.11: Budget guardrails for GitLab Credits","Learn how new spending caps and per-user credit limits give organizations the budget guardrails to scale GitLab Duo Agent Platform.",[742],"Bryan Rothwell","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1776259080/cakqnwo5ecp255lo8lzo.png","2026-04-16","Teams using GitLab Duo Agent Platform with on-demand GitLab Credits are shipping faster, catching bugs earlier, and automating tasks that used to take entire sprints. But as adoption grows, so does oversight from finance, procurement, and platform teams to prove that AI spending is bounded, predictable, and controllable.\n\nOne of the greatest barriers to broader AI adoption isn't skepticism about the technology. It's uncertainty about managing spend. Without budget caps, a busy month could produce unexpected expenses. Without per-user limits, a handful of power users could burn through the team's credits before the month is over. And without either, engineering leaders who want to expand their use of agentic AI for software development have to jump through more hoops for budget approval.\n\nSince its [general availability](https://about.gitlab.com/blog/gitlab-duo-agent-platform-is-generally-available/), GitLab Duo Agent Platform has provided usage governance and visibility. With GitLab 18.11, we're introducing usage controls for [GitLab Credits](https://about.gitlab.com/blog/introducing-gitlab-credits/): spending caps and budget guardrails that give your organization even more control and transparency over how credits are consumed.\n\n## Managing GitLab Credits\n\nGitLab 18.11 adds three layers of control over GitLab Credits consumption: a subscription-level spending cap, per-user credit limits, and visibility into cap status and enforcement.\n\n### Subscription-level spending cap\n\nBilling account managers can now set a hard monthly ceiling for on-demand GitLab Credits consumption for their entire subscription.\n\nHere's how it works:\n\n* **Set a cap** in the `Customers Portal` under your subscription's GitLab Credits settings.  \n* **Enforce spend limits automatically.**  When on-demand usage reaches the cap, DAP access is paused for all users on that subscription until the next monthly period begins.  \n* **Make adjustments as you go.** Raise or disable the cap mid-month to restore access.\n\nThe cap resets each monthly period and your configured limit carries forward unless you change it. Because usage data is synchronized periodically rather than in real time, a small amount of additional usage may occur after the cap is reached before enforcement takes effect. See the [GitLab Credits documentation](https://docs.gitlab.com/subscriptions/gitlab_credits/) for details.\n\n### User-level spending caps\n\nNot every user consumes credits at the same rate, and that's expected. But when one or two power users account for a disproportionate share of the pool, the rest of the team can lose access before the month is over.\n\nPer-user credit caps prevent any single user from consuming more than their fair share:\n\n* **Flat per-user cap.** Set a uniform credit limit that applies equally to every user on the subscription through the GitLab GraphQL API. Unlike the subscription-level cap, the per-user cap applies to a user's total consumption across all credit sources.  \n* **Custom per-user overrides.** For organizations that need differentiated limits, you can set individual credit caps for specific users through the GraphQL API. For example, you could give your staff engineers a higher allocation while applying a standard limit to the broader team.  \n* **Individual enforcement.** When a user reaches their cap, they retain full access to GitLab. Only their Duo Agent Platform credit usage is paused until the next billing cycle. Everyone else keeps working uninterrupted until they hit their own limit or the subscription-level cap is reached, whichever comes first.\n\n### Visibility and notifications\n\nWhen a subscription-level cap is reached, GitLab sends an email notification to billing account managers so they can take action: raise the cap, wait for the next period, or redistribute credits.\n\nWithin GitLab, group owners (GitLab.com) and instance administrators (Self-Managed) can view which users have been blocked due to reaching their per-user cap and restore access by adjusting the cap through the GraphQL API. \n\n## How budget guardrails help organizations scale AI usage\n\nGuardrails are essential as organizations ramp up their AI adoption. Here's why:\n\n### Predictable AI budgets\n\nUsage controls for GitLab Duo Agent Platform turn AI into a bounded, predictable budget item using on-demand GitLab Credits. That makes it easier to deploy agents across the software development lifecycle and get sign-off from finance, justify renewals, and plan quarterly spend.\n\n### Governance and chargeback\n\nLarge organizations often need to align AI consumption with internal budgets, cost centers, or departmental policies. Per-user caps give platform teams a straightforward mechanism to allocate credits fairly and track consumption at the individual level. The API import options make it practical to manage caps at enterprise scale. Combined with per-user usage data from the GitLab Credits dashboard, organizations can track consumption patterns to inform their own internal chargeback or budget allocation processes.\n\n### Confidence to scale\n\nMany customers start GitLab Duo Agent Platform with a small pilot group. Usage controls remove risks associated with expanding that pilot across the organization. You can roll out Duo Agent Platform to hundreds or thousands of developers knowing there's a hard ceiling protecting your budget. If usage grows faster than expected, you'll hit the cap, not an unexpected invoice.\n\n## Addressing the seat-based and visibility conundrum\n\nMany AI coding tools take a seat-based approach to cost management. You buy a fixed number of seats at a flat per-user price, and that's your budget. It's simple, but rigid. You pay the same whether a developer uses the tool ten times a day or never touches it. And as vendors introduce premium models and usage-based overages on top of seat pricing, the cost predictability that seat-based licensing promised starts to erode.\n\n\nGitLab takes a different approach. Usage-based pricing with hard caps and a single governance dashboard. You get the flexibility of paying for what your teams actually use, with the budget predictability of enforced spending limits.\n\n## Real-world usage controls\n\n**One example is a mid-size SaaS customer that wants to protect their monthly budget.** A 200-person engineering organization sets a subscription-level cap equal to their expected on-demand usage. Their VP of Engineering can confidently tell finance that GitLab Duo Agent Platform spend will never exceed the approved amount, even as they onboard new teams. If they approach the cap mid-month, the billing account manager gets a notification and can decide whether to raise the limit or wait for the next period.\n\n**At GitLab, we also work with large enterprises that want to keep usage fair across teams.** A global financial services company with 2,000 developers uses per-user caps to ensure equitable access. Staff engineers working on complex refactoring projects get a higher individual allocation via API, while most developers receive a standard flat cap. No single user can exhaust the pool, and the platform team uses the per-user usage data in the GitLab Credits dashboard to track consumption patterns and inform quarterly budget planning.\n\n## Getting started\n\nUsage controls are available for both GitLab.com and Self-Managed customers running GitLab 18.11. Different controls are configured in different places depending on the scope and your role.\n\n**Subscription-level cap**\n\nBilling account managers set the subscription-level on-demand cap in the Customers Portal:\n\n1. Sign in to the `Customers Portal`.  \n2. On your subscription card, navigate to **GitLab Credits** settings.  \n3. Enable the monthly on-demand credits cap and enter your desired limit.\n\n**Flat per-user cap**\n\nThe flat per-user cap can be set through the GitLab GraphQL API by namespace owners (GitLab.com) or instance administrators (Self-Managed). Check the [GitLab Credits documentation](https://docs.gitlab.com/subscriptions/gitlab_credits/) for the latest on available configuration surfaces.\n\n**Custom per-user overrides**\n\nFor differentiated limits, namespace owners (GitLab.com) and instance administrators (Self-Managed) can set individual caps programmatically. This is useful for automation and infrastructure-as-code workflows.\n\n**Monitor usage and cap status**\n\n* **Customers Portal:** View detailed usage and cap status.  \n* **GitLab.com:** Group owners can view blocked users under **Settings > GitLab Credits**.  \n* **Self-Managed:** Instance administrators can view cap status and blocked users under **Admin > GitLab Credits**.\n\n## GitLab Duo Agent Platform is ready to scale\n\nUsage controls are available now in GitLab 18.11. If you've been waiting for the right guardrails before expanding GitLab Duo Agent Platform across your organization, this is your moment. Set your caps, roll out Duo Agent Platform to more teams, and start shipping faster!\n\n> [Learn more about GitLab Credits and usage controls](https://docs.gitlab.com/subscriptions/gitlab_credits/).",[9,729,747],"news",{"featured":11,"template":12,"slug":749},"gitlab-18-11-budget-guardrails-for-gitlab-credits",{"promotions":751},[752,766,777,789],{"id":753,"categories":754,"header":756,"text":757,"button":758,"image":763},"ai-modernization",[755],"ai-ml","Is AI achieving its promise at scale?","Quiz will take 5 minutes or less",{"text":759,"config":760},"Get your AI maturity score",{"href":761,"dataGaName":762,"dataGaLocation":238},"/assessments/ai-modernization-assessment/","modernization assessment",{"config":764},{"src":765},"https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1772138786/qix0m7kwnd8x2fh1zq49.png",{"id":767,"categories":768,"header":769,"text":757,"button":770,"image":774},"devops-modernization",[9,564],"Are you just managing tools or shipping innovation?",{"text":771,"config":772},"Get your DevOps maturity score",{"href":773,"dataGaName":762,"dataGaLocation":238},"/assessments/devops-modernization-assessment/",{"config":775},{"src":776},"https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1772138785/eg818fmakweyuznttgid.png",{"id":778,"categories":779,"header":781,"text":757,"button":782,"image":786},"security-modernization",[780],"security","Are you trading speed for security?",{"text":783,"config":784},"Get your security maturity score",{"href":785,"dataGaName":762,"dataGaLocation":238},"/assessments/security-modernization-assessment/",{"config":787},{"src":788},"https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1772138786/p4pbqd9nnjejg5ds6mdk.png",{"id":790,"paths":791,"header":794,"text":795,"button":796,"image":801},"github-azure-migration",[792,793],"migration-from-azure-devops-to-gitlab","integrating-azure-devops-scm-and-gitlab","Is your team ready for GitHub's Azure move?","GitHub is already rebuilding around Azure. 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