GitLab 18.0 introduces breaking changes and removes deprecated features. Deployment windows for GitLab.com are April 21-23, April 28-30, and May 5-7, 2025. Self-Managed GitLab instances can upgrade starting May 15th, while GitLab Dedicated instances will upgrade June 24-29, 2025. A key change involves enforcing stricter CI/CD job token permissions using an allowlist. The Dependency Proxy will require specific scopes for authentication tokens. Vulnerability data retention limits are being introduced for GitLab.com Ultimate users. Container image pull policies will be strictly enforced. PostgreSQL 14 and 15 support ends, requiring PostgreSQL 16 for GitLab 18.0. Several other changes include deprecating Terraform CI/CD templates, updating the Prometheus subchart, and ending SLES 15 SP2 package builds. Gitaly's rate limiter is being removed in favor of the Concurrency Limiter. Finally, application security testing analyzers will receive major version updates.