Gitlab is a must have!

Item: GitLab
Rating: 10
Author: Marco Urrea

Overall Satisfaction with GitLab

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It addresses repository and CI/CD pipelines and allows you to use your own agents. Because of all its integrations, it’s very good for managing an organization with different projects. It also has great features for controlling an organization, and it has security features like MFA and a built-in key vault. It can be integrated with other products like Vault and Terraform.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Repository management.
CI/CD pipelines.
Organization and team management.
Integration with other tools.

Cons

UI can improve.

Return on Investment

It was great for product collaboration.
Very easy to use.
Loved the pipelines.
I loved the integration potential.

Alternatives Considered

GitHub, Bitbucket, Azure Repos and Azure Pipelines

Because it has the latest features, it is perfect for collaboration, has the best integrations available, and is super secure. Basically, it covers all my needs and the companies. I love its pipelines because of its secrets and agents. I also love that you can manage the project and the user base with Terraform.

Security

They don’t use a paid plan, but it does have security alerts.

Continuous Integration

I love it because of its agents. To run pipelines. Team management is good because you can assign the right roles.

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

HashiCorp Vault, HashiCorp Terraform

Likelihood to Recommend

I love the product overall compared to GitHub and Bitbucket. Honestly, it's the best repo and CICD tool in the market. I’ve been using it for quite a few years—actually since 2019—and by far, it's the best and easiest to use, manage teams, and integrate with other software.

GitLab Feature Ratings

Collaboration and Performance

Code Management

Definitely thanks to its organization it is easy to manage different teams and projects. Basically controlling, who has access to what, and what can they do there as well as see. Control is very granular which is very convenient depending on the access levels of each user and it is also very easy to set up.

Workload Coordination

Code reviews are very easy to manage, an approver can be set up, also depending on the rules you can also protect branches, regarding deliveries. CI/CD pipelines are amazing and very easy to control they allow also remote agents., they also have a secrets storage which also support sensitive values.

Tool Consolidation

I really like it more than jenkins and github. Has replaced circleCI and travis which I was originally using for my github implementation and before Github actions. Overall, GitLab is a very complete solution and was ahead of its time compared to the competitors which have been trying to catch up.

Using GitLab

Users and Roles

100 - DevOps Engineers, Software engineers, Scrum Master, software architects, project managers.

Support Headcount Required

10 - This person is usually the client when we are helping them build their solution.

Business Processes Supported

for managing infrastructure as code (terraform)
Managing Hashicorp Vault projects
Managing Sentinel Projects
Managing regular application projects
Testing code before deploying it to an environment

Innovative Uses

SSO integration
Agents

Future Planned Uses

To control restricted code for clients when providing as a service product

Likelihood to Renew

I really feel the platform has matured quite faster than others, and it is always at the top of its game compared to the different vendors like GitHub, Azure pipelines, CircleCI, Travis, Jenkins. Since it provides, agents, CI/CD, repository hosting, Secrets management, user management, and Single Sign on; among other features

Evaluating GitLab and Competitors

Products Replaced

Yes - I replaced Github, and CircleCI. Because Github Actions at the time didn't exist, and it also didn't have a secrets management platform

Key Differentiators

Integration with Other Systems
Ease of Use

The ease of use from a single platform, so I didn't have to keep looking elsewhere since it had all I needed

Evaluation Lessons Learned

I would compare the current competitiors, Divide it by different categories.
- VCS
-Secrets Management
- CI-CD
- Agents
- integration with other platforms or services
- User Acccess and control

GitLab Support

GitLab Customer Support Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed Support understands my problem Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response	None