This article is based on reporting originally published by DevClass in October 2019, drawing on an interview with Meltano project head Danielle Morrill.
What Is Meltano?
Meltano is an open-source DataOps platform originally created by GitLab. First unveiled in August 2018, the project spent much of its first year in relative quiet before reaching v1.0, announced at a GitLab event in London in October 2019. At that milestone, the platform could also be installed and run directly from DigitalOcean, lowering the barrier to cloud deployment considerably.
Leadership of the project was handed to Danielle Morrill, previously founder and CEO of Mattermark, the data intelligence startup. Under her stewardship, the project’s focus shifted from being primarily developer-oriented to explicitly serving the full data team spectrum: data engineers, data scientists, and data analysts.
The Problem Meltano Was Trying to Solve
The core premise behind Meltano was straightforward: the data world suffers from the same toolchain fragmentation that plagued software development before modern DevOps practices took hold. As Morrill put it in an interview with DevClass:
“They have different problems, because they have different tools, but it has the same tool chain chaos, basically.”
Data analysts, data engineers, and data scientists all work with different tooling, different skill levels, and often on isolated machines rather than in collaborative, cloud-based environments. Meltano aimed to apply the GitLab philosophy — a unified, version-controlled software lifecycle — to the DataOps world.
The v1.0 Architecture: Chaining Open-Source Tools
Rather than building everything from scratch, Meltano v1.0 worked by chaining together existing open-source tools into a coherent end-to-end pipeline. At the time of the v1.0 release, the core stack included:
- Stitch — data ingestion and extraction
- dbt (data build tool) — data transformation
- Apache Airflow — workflow orchestration and scheduling
- Jupyter Notebook — data exploration and analysis
The Meltano team had additionally developed their own modelling and data visualisation components, though Morrill acknowledged they were still looking for open-source equivalents to fill those gaps rather than maintaining custom-built solutions long-term.
The stated goal for the v1.0 experience was ambitious in its simplicity: go from nothing to a working dashboard in ten minutes or less, without having to manage hosting infrastructure.
What Was Still Missing: Version Control and Collaboration
Despite reaching v1.0, Morrill was candid about two significant gaps that the project had not yet addressed.
Version Control
Perhaps the most striking admission from the head of a GitLab project: Meltano did not yet have version control built in. “The big thing going forward is version control. We don’t have that yet,” Morrill told DevClass. For a platform explicitly positioned as bringing Git-style discipline to the data stack, this was a roadmap priority rather than an existing feature.
Collaboration
The second gap was collaborative workflows. At the time, the overwhelming reality in data science was that individuals worked locally — on laptops, with data residing in local memory. This meant no real-time collaboration, no shared state, and no ability to work across distributed teams in the way software engineers had come to expect.
“Most data people still do their work on a laptop. So it’s in their local memory. It’s like if you have a laptop on an aeroplane, too bad, like you can’t collaborate. So that’s a way in which the data ops world is really behind.”
— Danielle Morrill, Meltano Project Head
The Market Opportunity GitLab Was Targeting
Morrill framed the data analyst market as a major expansion opportunity for GitLab, estimating roughly 10 million data analysts worldwide. Because data analysts work with code-adjacent tooling but are not typically treated as software developers, she argued they represented an addressable market that could potentially double GitLab’s reach.
The competitive set she identified — Tableau, Periscope, and Looker — was deliberately ambitious. Tableau had just been acquired by Salesforce for $15 billion earlier in 2019. Morrill’s counter-argument was that Meltano’s advantage would be speed and end-to-end integration: “What we can do is be ahead of them on being fast with the end to end experience, because it’s going to be tough for Tableau to do that.”
She characterised the data science vertical as representing “another $1bn opportunity” for GitLab, while also framing Meltano as a proof-of-concept for a broader GitLab strategy: building vertical, end-to-end applications on top of its platform — with marketing automation cited as another potential area.
The 1,000 Monthly Active Users Goal
At the time of the interview in October 2019, Meltano had approximately 300 monthly active users. The public target Morrill set was to reach 1,000 monthly active users by the end of 2019 — a roughly 3x growth target over roughly two months, with a team of six people working on the project at GitLab.
External contributions to the project were cited as an early indicator of momentum, with Morrill noting that third-party contributors signalled confidence in the project’s direction even before key features like version control had shipped.
Context: What Happened to Meltano After 2019
It is worth noting for readers encountering this history that Meltano’s trajectory changed significantly after 2019. GitLab eventually spun Meltano out as an independent open-source project. The platform evolved substantially — pivoting toward a Singer-based ELT (Extract, Load, Transform) framework and becoming a standalone tool no longer directly tied to GitLab’s product suite. Readers researching Meltano for current use should consult the current Meltano documentation rather than relying on v1.0-era descriptions.
Key Takeaways
- Meltano v1.0 (October 2019) was GitLab’s attempt to bring DevOps-style workflows to the data stack, targeting data engineers, analysts, and scientists.
- The platform chained Stitch, dbt, Apache Airflow, and Jupyter Notebook into an opinionated end-to-end pipeline.
- Version control and cloud collaboration were explicitly identified as missing features on the near-term roadmap.
- The competitive targets — Tableau, Looker, Periscope — reflected an ambitious positioning against established BI and analytics incumbents.
- Meltano has since evolved significantly and now operates as an independent open-source project outside GitLab.