Gitlab improve our Continuous Integration.

Item: GitLab
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

GitLab allows us to manage our source code into different groups. It improves code readability and efficiency, for example, with the Web IDE, which is a good feature. We are also using Gitlab CI, which is very efficient and well-integrated. We centralize users into Gitlab, and we used SAML to get them into other apps that we used within our stack (for example, SonarQube).

Pros and Cons

Source code management.
Continuous integration.
Merge requests flow.
Users management.

CI variables management is sometimes hard to use, for example, with File type variables. The scope of each variable is also hard to guess.
Access Token: there are too many types (Personal, Project, global..), and it is hard to identify the scope and where it comes from once created.
Runners: auto-scaled runners are for the moment hard to put in place, and monitoring is not easy.

Return on Investment

With Gitlab CI, it improves our release process, reducing him to a few minutes versus a few hours before.
Gitlab centralizes all of our source code and adds a global view of everything.

Alternatives Considered

Bitbucket and GitHub

We are coming from Bitbucket, and we switch to Gitlab to improve the source code management and the reading, which is better on Gitlab. The Merge request flow is also better than Bitbucket. This allows us to use Gitlab CI, which is well-integrated. Compared to GitHub, it is available in a self-managed instance, so we have full control, but it can be harder to configure.

Continuous Integration

We used Gitlab CI to execute all of our pipelines. We used to include main templates in several repositories so that everything is centralized. It is also enabled at the Merge Request level so once an MR is submitted, the pipeline is running and the code is merged only if tests are okay and if there there is no issues.

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?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of GitLab go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy GitLab again?

Yes

Other Software Used

SonarQube, Jira Software, Sonatype Nexus Repository OSS

Likelihood to Recommend

Once you have some code source to manage, Gitlab is a good choice. You don’t need to use all features to have a good experience with Gitlab. For example, if you are using another tool for CI and another tool for tickets, you can easily integrate them into Gitlab. But of course, using Gitlab CI and the integrated issues tool improve the user experience and enable the full flow that is available.