>us devopish types are both quite costly and quite rare - but I think operating the service as they do today seriously tarnishes the Gitlab brand.

The sad thing is it doesn't have to be this way. Software stacks and sysadmin is out there for the learning, but due to the incentives of moving jobs every two years, nobody wants to invest to make those people, we all know we'l find /someone/ to do it anyways.