GitLab this week made available a 13.9 update that adds more than 60 new features and updated capabilities to its namesake open source continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform.
Brian Glanz, a product marketing manager for GitLab, said chief among those capabilities is a Security Alert Dashboard that enables DevOps teams to triage high-priority alerts more easily. As more organizations embrace DevSecOps best processes, application development teams need to be able to prioritize which security issues are more pressing than others, Glanz said.
Other new capabilities include the ability to reuse a pipeline of a CI/CD configuration, and a maintenance mode option that keeps instance available while administrative tasks are being performed.
Additionally, it’s now possible to view group-level analysis of release metrics, in addition to the ability to view a version of a pipeline configuration with all of the include and extends configurations merged together.
Glanz said GitLab continues to gain traction, because all the capabilities it provides are based on the same integrated code base. The effort a DevOps team needs to exert to take advantage of new capabilities is substantially less than rival platforms, Glanz said.
At the same time, Glanz noted that the number of contributors to GitLab coming from outside the company also continues to increase. The latest version has 299 merged contributions from the wider GitLab community.
It’s not clear how much of an appetite organizations have, these days, to replace an existing CI/CD platform. However, it’s not uncommon for organizations to have multiple CI/CD platforms employed by different DevOps teams. In the meantime, the number of teams within enterprise IT organizations that are embracing DevSecOps processes to advance digital business transformation initiatives continues to rise. As more organizations realize how dependent they are on custom software to differentiate themselves from rivals, more enterprise IT organizations will opt to standardize on a single CI/CD platform to both reduce costs and increase overall efficiency.
A report published last year by GitLab noted organizations can improve application development and delivery by 87%, resulting in a savings of more than $23 million. Overall, the report claims organizations can see a 407% return on investment (ROI) on the GitLab platform.
Naturally, competition among CI/CD platform providers remains fierce. With most developers working from home to help combat the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, these platform providers have been touting their ability to support remote work. It’s not clear if developers will be returning to the office en masse now that COVID-19 vaccines are being distributed. However, it’s clear that even once the pandemic subsides, the way application code is created and maintained will be a lot more fluid. Many organizations are now more comfortable hiring developers wherever they can find them.
Of course, many of those developers are going to be wary of joining organizations that have disjointed workflows, especially when it comes to shifting responsibility for application security further left toward developers. In fact, the ability of any organization to effectively recruit developers is now directly tied to the overall sophistication of their DevOps workflows.
