Great to hear that. Deploy boards is one of the few features that came from our own vision more than customer requests. So we're very happy to get validation that this is something people need. GitLab 9.1 will have canary deploys and an automatically deploy board to make deployments even better.
Is there an api for users that might want to integrate alternative schedulers for these features? Would be lovely to be able to integrate Nomad somewhat natively.
No, but we're hoping to work together with the community to make all these features available on all major platforms [0].
One thing that we're seeing is that most schedulers are moving towards supporting Kubernetes, which goes a long way in making this work there. Right now we support Kubernetes through Google Container Engine or via Openshift.
Right now Kubernetes is a project service in GitLab. We would love to have a project service for Nomad to do the same. Right now we're focussed on Kubernetes but we hope the wider community will pick up the other schedulers.
Also see https://about.gitlab.com/strategy/
"The people that have the most knowledge have to prioritize breadth over depth since only they can add new functionality. Making the functionality more comprehensive requires less coordination than making the initial minimal feature. Shipping functionality that is incomplete to expand the scope sometimes goes against our instincts. However leading the way is needed to allow others to see our path and contribute. So when in doubt, the rule of thumb is breadth over depth, so everyone can contribute."