DevOps Master: Help Us Utilize Gitlab Enterprise + CI/CD for Mid-Size Dev Projects

I managed a team of application developers around the world. We have been increasing our usage of GitLab for both project management and source control. I would like to take this to the next level and deploy an internally managed instance of Gitlab Enterprise (I would opt for cloud offering but the pricing is more advantageous for self-hosted). One of the key objectives I want to be able to accomplish here this project is automated deployment of review apps as well as automated testing to ensure he changes about to be committed don't break anything. A few things about our work: - Heavy user of AWS platform services (like RDS, Elasticsearch Service, S3, Cognito, API Gateway, Lambda etc...) - Backend components are almost exclusively built in Python. Exceptions to this would be cases where we are relying on non-Python based platforms, such as Elasticsearch. - Frontend components are almost exclusively built as React webapps. Before shifting work to Gitlab, we experimented with using AWS Codestar (which has fully managed build service, automated continuous delivery and deployments, etc...). It was extremely useful to be able to commit code and have that automatically kickoff a deployment so we could examine the changes from within the context of the application. For the scope of this project, I would like your help with the following: - Installation and configuration of Gitlab Enterprise on AWS, Including any integration required to enable automated deployments. This would include configuration of the AWS kubernetes service, etc... - Guidance on how to best handle projects with heavy AWS dependencies - for example, would deploying a review app standup an entirely separate environment via CloudFormation? Or would we have dev/test/prod AWS assets setup ahead of time that the review apps would depend on (for example, if we were building an app atop the AWS Elasticsearch service). - Guidance on how we can build application templates that may facilitate the process of beginning work on a new project. For example, CodeStar had several project templates to choose from ([login to view URL]). - Any other expertise you can provide to help our team move through projects in a more efficient manner (across project management, development, testing, deployment, etc...). In order to be considered for this project, you must have experience with Gitlab in an enterprise environment working on agile projects. Please mention specific experience in your responses - it will help me identify you as someone I should talk to as part of the selection process. :-)