GitLab DevSecOps platform enables software innovation by aiming to empower development, security, and operations teams to build better software, faster. With GitLab, teams can create, deliver, and manage code quickly and continuously instead of managing disparate tools and scripts. GitLab helps teams across the complete DevSecOps lifecycle, from developing, securing, and deploying software. Differentiators, as described by Gitlab:
Simplicity: With GitLab, DevSecOps can…
Mostly it is very suitable for any product based company who wants to add a CI system for their products. This tool is perfectly suitable for a company which releases builds very frequently. By using this tool they can reduce a tremendous amount of manual effort. If company's budget is not high and if they can not afford the premium plan then this tool won't be suitable for them because the basic version of this tool won't provide much functionality
It is well-suited for any project that needs VCS. It's an excellent choice for teams that might be remote or have to collaborate across teams. Plenty of features allow for async working. With its dashboards and reporting features, it is also suitable for nontechnical PMs or stakeholders. It allows for very bespoke customization and can most often do much more than you need it to.
First thing is this tool is scalable which is the biggest advantage of this tool. It won't take much time in setup and making it ready. It has a very good user interface.
This tool has almost every source code repository support like Git, SVN, Microsoft Foundation Server etc. Moreover, it has very good support for various build tools like Visual Studio, MSBuild etc., which makes it even batter.
We can trigger multiple builds at a time with the Premier subscription.
It allows users to apply many deep levels of configurations which make the whole system even easier.
Mostly I don't have much more recommendation for improvement because this tool provides almost everything which would be required in any continuous integration system. But still I would suggest improvement in the reporting system. The build report is a field where they can make improvement by adding more information if they want.
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
I find it easy to use, I haven't had to do the integration work, so that's why it is a 9/10, cause I can't speak to how easy that part was or the initial set up, but day to day use is great!
I've never had experienced outages from GItlab itself, but regarding the code I have deployed to Gitlab, the history helps a lot to trace the cause of the issue or performing a rollback to go back to a working version
GItlab reponsiveness is amazing, has never left me IDLE. I've never had issues even with complex projects. I have not experienced any issues when integrating it with agents for example or SSO
At this point, I do not have much experience with Gitlab support as I have never had to engage them. They have documentation that is helpful, not quite as extensive as other documentation, but helpful nonetheless. They also seem to be relatively responsive on social media platforms (twitter) and really thrived when GitHub was acquired by Microsoft
In my previous company I have used Jenkins for maintaining their CI system. Even this tool is also very good. The good thing about this tool is it’s an open source project. So in terms of pricing, we can consider this tool as an alternative to continua CI. One has to compare both of the products before going to use any one because both have their own benefits and drawbacks.
GitHub is an inferior product from most points of view. We had to use it and the teams finds no positives about it. Everything is a downgrade from our previous GitLab solution. GitLab CI\CD is vastly superior to workflows, for example doing a manual node is just "when : manual" in GitLab while you have to do clickops in GitHub to achieve the same. No overview of code in branches is a minus when we tried to figure out what our colleagues are trying to merge as it looked off.
Basically, this tool will reduce manual effort of creating, deploying and testing software products. So ultimately it will reduce manpower which would otherwise be required for such things.
It is time saving and improves the overall performance of the entire team and system.
