GitLab: What a great toy!

Item: GitLab
Rating: 8
Author: Juan Orlando Cartagena Duran

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use GitLab as the centralized version control tool for all our products/teams within the business unit. Basically GitLab helped us to have a unified platform to keep our repositories organized. Also, it addressed the issue of having different locations to grant permissions to access code. Now, everything is in just one place.

Pros and Cons

Several features when creating pull requests
Easy to configure GitLab runners to run tests
Allows to define/configure permissions using Terraform

Missing history file (diff)
Slow user interface
Commits are hard to find
Diff interface

Return on Investment

We were able to unify different tools in a single one to increse productivity.

Alternatives Considered

Bitbucket Server (discontinued), GitHub and Gerrit Code

It was a management decision to use GitLab over other tools. It integrates well with RBAC using Terraform. Runners are easy to setup. Almost all the features the organization used before are available in GitLab.

Security

We have a paid plan. It is being paid through AWS Marketplace. We haven't used any GitLab’s security features yet.

Continuous Integration

We have used CI/CD before with Bitbucket and Bamboo, but now it is easier to have both functionalities within the same tool (GitLab). You can create test plans using code (in Bamboo you used the GUI) and it makes it easier to understand what the test plan does. But there are other things that you miss like in Bamboo you were able to see what a Bamboo agent was doing in real time from the UI; in GitLab you can't.

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

Jira Software, Jenkins, Microsoft Visual Studio Code

Likelihood to Recommend

My opinion is taking into account that we were using Bitbucket in the past. The Diff interface was friendlier. The general navigation is more complicated (too many things in one place; hard to find specific things). If you want to find the commits of the repository, there is no direct access; you need to go through the menu. We miss with GitLab the ability to see diff file history when comparing with a previous commit.