Hi binderbizingdos, GitLab.com co-founder here. I'm glad to hear GitLab meets your needs. We know some upgrades have been painful, especially to 5.0 where Gitolite was removed. Since then we try to have smoother upgrades with complete documentation. Of course we can't avoid deprecation in major releases to move things forward. Each release is stable but if you want to be extra careful upgrade two weeks after release. But please let us know if there is anything specific we should focus on.