The discussion chain is everything that's wrong with modern engineering. A complex topic progressively simplified and abstracted to just "Run this container", ensuring no one in your org actually understands how it works, how to maintain it and how to debug it.

The GP was interested in "trying" Gitlab. If you want to try it out, but are wary of the time involved, isn't a docker-compose installation a great solution?

Gitlab is a complex system. I wouldn’t expect anyone to suddenly understand my companies’ product either.