Does these pipelines thing imply moving away from Sidekiq? At work that's our biggest issue with Gitlab. Sidekiq dies all the time and Gitlab has to be restarted for merge requests to work again.
From https://about.gitlab.com/installation/ "One-click installers are frequently out of date and might not contain our Omnibus packages. An example of this are the Bitnami packages in the past couldn't be updated and are now much harder to update than the Omnibus packages. We advise to not use one-click installers but instead start an vanilla Ubuntu instance and use the recommended Omnibus package installation. This is almost as quick as a one-click install and you're sure of the latest version and easy upgrades."