An Application for the Full Development Lifecycle

Item: GitLab
Rating: 9
Author: Brandon Scivolette

Overall Satisfaction with GitLab

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We utilize GitLab for source code management and CI/CD. With GitLab we were able to automate our development workflow and DevOps strategy; we can easily deploy and build to our dev and production environments. GitLab is very user-friendly and has a great UI, which makes it easy to manage our code from the web or our IDE.

Pros and Cons

Pros

CI/CD.
Workflow Automation.
Product Releases and Improvements.
Deployment.

Cons

More support/integrations with third-party applications.

Return on Investment

Improved efficiency of our development lifecycle.
Automated deploys mean fewer mistakes.

Alternatives Considered

GitHub

When it comes to source code management (e.g. a repository) GitLab isn't as popular as GitHub. This can be problematic at times as GitLab does not have as much support from third-party applications, including IDEs. You can almost guarantee that GitHub has a plugin, extension, or "app" but that isn't always the case with GitLab. That being said, GitLab is more fully-featured than GitHub. I recall the first time I tried to compare the two and it took me a few minutes to understand that GitLab is essentially an all-in-one development platform, whereas GitHub is better defined as a repository. With GitLab, you can track and manage issues directly in the application without relying on a third-party application like Jira.

Continuous Integration

As you would expect from a typical Git-based application they handle shared code exceedingly well, although the majority of our Git-based tasks/operations are actually done in our IDE and pushed to GitLab. The one Git task we often complete in GitLab itself has merged requests and their UI makes it super easy. Dealing with complex merge conflicts can sometimes be a hassle but most of the time you can handle conflicts directly in their web application.

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

Jira Software, Visual Studio IDE, New Relic

Likelihood to Recommend

One thing that I think GitLab does exceedingly well is product releases. Every month on the 22nd they roll out a huge release, oftentimes with nearly 1000 improvements, fixes, and new features. It's pretty impressive that they can make so much headway in a single month! If you are worried that GitLab doesn't have what you are looking for, like a specific feature, you can rest assured it will be coming sooner than later.

Comments

Please log in to join the conversation