Making development life easy with GitLab

Item: GitLab
Rating: 8
Author: Nirmal Gaur

Overall Satisfaction with GitLab

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I have used GitLab previously in one of the team project. The built in CI/CD pipeline feature helps a lot where we don't have to worry about deploying the code manually after every change pushed to the repository. The interface was user friendly. One thing that sets GitLab apart is the graph visualization of the milestones completed.

Pros and Cons

Pros

one can create repository where multiple people in the team can work together and track the progress.
CI/CD pipelines can be created to host the code and handle the deployment in dev/qa/prod servers.
graph visualization of the work that has been completed in the milestones.

Cons

for the first time user, code review is little complicated.
there are some bugs which makes user experience complex.
after creating a PR, it is little complex to approve and merge changes.

Return on Investment

The development process became faster.
Tracking the work completed is pretty easy to monitor.
If something goes wrong, one can simply track back to the previous version,

Alternatives Considered

GitHub and Atlassian Bitbucket

As mentioned earlier, the features like chart visualization sets it apart from the others. Other than that, GitLab is open source while other are not and comparatively more secure that its other counterparts. Also, GitLab supports adding other types of attachments which is not supported by GitHub. On the top of all this, the user interface makes it stand apart.

Security

Yes, in the project we used GitLab utlimate paid plan which comes with various security features. Some of them are defined below: GitLab detects security vulnerabilities that include unauthorized access or data leaks. This will directly appear in the data merge requests such that necessary actions can be taken to avoid it.

Continuous Integration

Working in a project with multiple developers, GitLab really helps to share the code and track the development process. Before merging the code changes, raising a pull request (PR) helps to check the quality of the code and improve it. If the code pushed is breaking something, GitLab will not allow the merge.

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

GitHub, Atlassian Bitbucket

Likelihood to Recommend

It is well suited for the projects where you have to deploy in various environments like dev, qa or production. Once a CI/CD pipelines has been created, one can simply push their code by raising a PR from one env to other and deploy theier code to the targeted environment.

GitLab Feature Ratings

Comments

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