GitLab: Future of DevOps

Item: GitLab
Rating: 6
Author: Shivangani Tamrakar

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We've started using GitLab in my organization for hosting git based repositories and slowly we've started using it for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery and as soon as GitLab launched container registry, package registry and dependency proxy we started to use those as well and it went amazing, GitLab is well suited to us since now we have everything in a single platform.

Pros and Cons

Hosting Git Based Source Code Repositories
Container Registry, Package Registry, Infrastructure Registry and Dependency Proxy
Service Desk and Issue management on every project
CI / CD

As per my requirements currently I don't see any scope of improvement

Return on Investment

GitLab cut down our spent on container, package and infrastructure registry
Best thing is we can now have everything in single platform which cost effective too
Quality of support is really good and they do have emergency support team as well which is great

Alternatives Considered

GitHub

GitLab is rich in features and access control if compared with GitHub also GitHub stands no where in CI/CD if compared with GitLab.

GitLab CI/CD is mature, robust and far better than GitHub actions in all means.

If I talk about quality of support and reponse time of GitLab it is very good and Emergency support is super valuable offering which let's my team to fix issues quickly.

Security

We do use GitLab's Enterprise Plans but we've not used any security features of GitLab ye.

Continuous Integration

We have a lint job in integrate stage in gitlab-ci.yml of our projects and that job continuously lints code on feature branches before build and this process doesn't lets the code which is faulty and it did reduced validation issues in protected and default branches as validation problems are fixed within the feature branches itself.

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

JFrog Artifactory, Platform9 Managed Kubernetes, Chainguard, Codefresh, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Datadog, HashiCorp Terraform, Docker

Likelihood to Recommend

We started to use GitLab for hosting git source code repositories of our projects only but slowly we started to use it to store container images, packages, dependency proxy as well infrastucture registry and it is now well suited for Continuous Integration in our projects, It wasn't that good in Continuous Deployment before 12.0 version but after 12.0 it is amazingly good for Continuous Deployment as well since it keeps deployment information in a well organized manner which can be configure in ci yaml configuration.