GitLab: Future of DevOps
Updated December 21, 2021

GitLab: Future of DevOps

ANurag Tamrakar | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with GitLab

GitLab is not just a source code repository hosting platform. It's a DevOps platform bagged with source code repository hosting, continuous integration, continuous delivery, artifact management, package management, Container registries, SAST, issue tracking and management, Source code vulnerability scanning, and much more. Very good role-based access control + user and group management. Group-based Isolation is also very good. Even If you're giant incorporation can easily manage multiple organizations within one instance of GitLab.
  • Source code repository hosting.
  • Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment.
  • Package, Artifact, Container Image hosting.
  • Source code scanning.
  • Issue management and service desk.
  • There are two offerings, Self-managed and SaaS. The cost of both types of offers is the same which I don't like, the cost of self-managed GitLab should be less.
  • There are some resource limitations SaaS version if compared with self managed.
  • Licensing of self-managed shouldn't be per user it should be a fixed amount per instance.
  • There should be a feature of webhook proxy. This will feature addition will enable GitLab to send webhooks to resources hosted in a private network.
  • It made development easier and reduced the release cycles as all the development operations are being executed in one single platform.
  • As it came with in-built CI/CD, Artifact management, Package, and Container registry. we've stopped maintaining all of them separately which resulted in increased productivity of our team.
  • As we're using the SaaS version of GitLab all the automation which are backed by webhooks has stopped working as GitLab doesn't support sending webhooks to resources that are hosted in private networks.
  • We're saving dollars and our effort of infrastructure and server maintenance by using the SaaS version of GitLab.
GitLab is rich in features if compared with GitHub or Bitbucket. GitHub is very popular and now it supports CI/CD as well which is known as GitHub actions but it's not mature as GitLab CI is. When we decided to use GitLab, Gitlab-CI was one of the strong reasons to make a decision. We're a big branched corporate with multiple organizations. Some organization needs to host source code repositories in their own infrastructure. GitHub doesn't offer a Self-managed instance it's only SaaS-based but GitLab does offer a self-managed instance.
Yes, we're using paid plans of Gitlab but we're not using security features of GitLab as we're already using some other security tools such as Checkmarx, Blackduck, and SonarQube to identify security vulnerabilities and quality of code.
By using GitLab CI we are linting our source code and deploying it on dev and test servers. GitLab pipeline is triggered on Every commit if it's configured for the branch in which a commit is made. All the collaborators receive an email from GitLab for pipeline failure if a stage is failed. Earlier we were using a separate CI tool to lint and deploy the code and it was an annoying task for us to notify all if code has validation, stylistic or programmatic errors.

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

JFrog Artifactory, SonarQube, Checkmarx, Bitbucket, Terraform, by HashiCorp, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Visual Studio Code, GitHub, Jira Software, Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), AWS Certificate Manager, Amazon Route 53, Amazon CloudFront, Cloudflare, Jenkins, 1Password, greytHR, Kibana, Elasticsearch, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Sumo Logic, Dynatrace, Docker, Kubernetes, PagerDuty, CentOS Linux, AWS Lambda, AWS CodePipeline, Grafana
It's not just a source code repository hosting platform. When we started using GitLab it reduced our burden of managing some tools like CICD, Artifactory as It's a DevOps platform bagged with source code repository hosting, continuous integration, continuous delivery, artifact management, package management, container register, SAST, issue tracking, and management, Source code vulnerability scanning and much more. I thought a lot about the demerits of GitLab but there isn't any disadvantage of using GitLab it's better than all means if compared with GitHub or BitBucket. I strongly recommend using GitLab. It's super valuable.

Using GitLab

600 - Engineering
600 - Our Engineering teams use GitLab to manage and host source code repositories of their products. Also, they use to set up CI and CD for their projects and deploy container images, packages, and artifacts in Gitlab.
  • Hosting Source code repositories.
  • Storing artifacts, container images and packages.
  • Setting up CI/CD pipelines.