GitLab - A fully integrated solution for developer

Item: GitLab
Rating: 10
Author: Jordan Deroubaix

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using GitLab as a common internal platform.
It is used by several departments across the whole organization (IT Department, DevOps team, Services, etc.).

GitLab is used for several reasons:

Versioning server (it stores all company's sources code).
Task and issue boards.
Wiki (it stores all useful information related to projects).
Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery.
Linked to external tool as SonarQube (Code Analysis / Security).

Pros and Cons

Issue / task board.
CI/CD.
Code Review.
Wiki.

Reports.

Return on Investment

Reduce time to deploy.
Easier rollback.
Better code review.
Increase efficiency.

Alternatives Considered

Azure DevOps Server (formerly Team Foundation Server)

GitLab can be installed OnPrem, and in my company, we had to choose a solution that was not on the Cloud.

Open source.
Several security / fix updates per month.
New release every month.

Previously, we were using TFS (Team Foundation Server), but it was mainly for Microsoft projects and not fully integrated with other kind of projects.

Compare to GitLab, this solution consumed more resources and performance. (Same for server costs.)

Security

We are not using any of GitLab's paid plans.

Continuous Integration

We are using GitLab CI/CD tools on a daily basis. It is used to deploy our developments to all of our platforms: staging, quality, production.

CI/CD is used for several reasons :

Deployments.
Build.
Unit test.
Security/Analysis tests (with additional tool SonarQube).
Documentation analysis.

Based on the project, it may not use all scopes of features, but this is the strength of GitLab to be able to fully customize the CI/CD by project.

Key Insights

Do you think GitLab delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with GitLab's feature set?

Yes

Did GitLab live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of GitLab go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy GitLab again?

Yes

Other Software Used

SonarQube, Microsoft Visual Studio Code

Likelihood to Recommend

GitLab is a complete tool that allows developers to fully integrate their work with their daily tasks:

Create issues.
Push some code to this issue.
Doing code review (Comment / Reject / Approve).
Deploy to test / staging / production servers effortlessly.

In order to be fully integrated with all systems, it has to be configured properly. So the main difficulty here is to describe and define all processes and tasks to automate deployments for example.