GitLab Inc, a company that offers a complete DevOps Platform, announces the next iteration of its single application with its 14 release.
Gitlab 14 enables global businesses to advance adoption of DevOps by replacing disparate technologies and tool chains with a single DevOps platform configured to work by default.
With the product innovation and additional functionality shipped monthly, GitLab is furthering its commitment to bringing the most advanced DevOps platform to businesses.
According to the company’s 5th annual DevSecOps Report, 60% of developers are releasing code 2x faster than ever before because of DevOps.
The global rise of remote work due to the pandemic, made companies to rethink their digital transformation and security plus recognizing the need for a modern DevOps platform versus multiple disparate technologies and point solutions.
“The rise of remote work and focus on digital transformation has led businesses to grapple with siloed teams and pressure to deliver secure software at extraordinary speeds to compete in the market,” said Scott Williamson, Chief Product Officer at GitLab Inc.
“With the GitLab 14 innovation and our plans for the future, we will continue to push the industry forward by providing a modern DevOps Platform in a single application.”
“Companies can bring together their teams in one place enabling them to innovate and accelerate their software development processes,” said Scott Williamson.
Single platform increases DevOps velocity and efficiency
As businesses transition to modern DevOps practices, the pivot from complex toolchains to a single DevOps platform is becoming more of a reality.
According to Gartner, 40% of companies will switch to DevOps value stream delivery platforms to streamline application delivery by 2023, versus less than 10% in 2020.
GitLab’s consistent and efficient developer and operator experience leads to a simplified and more predictable software development lifecycle.
Teams use one tool for source code management (SCM), continuous integration (CI), and continuous delivery(CD) making teams more efficient with streamlined collaboration.
Key focus areas and development features include
Pipeline Editor
Lowers the CI/CD barrier to entry for novices and accelerates power users with visual authoring and versioning, continuous validation, and pipeline visualization.
GitLab Kubernetes Agent
Enables secure, cloud-native GitOps.
GitLab goes to customer locations to support GitOps with agent-based and agentless approaches. Deployments are regardless of whether infrastructure is cloud-native.
Visibility and measurement increase DevOps success
Instrumenting systems to surface meaningful metrics is difficult and time-consuming; many businesses struggle to find the metrics that map their DevOps investments to business results.
With GitLab’s CI/CD dashboard, deployment frequency charts, and monitoring, organizations gain confidence in their ability to drive both team performance and competitive advantage.
Visibility on lead time for changes, change failure rate, deployment frequency, time to restore service or the DORA4 metrics, and value stream analytics identify and break down bottlenecks.
New and upcoming metrics and reporting features include
Value Stream Analytics
Identify inefficiencies and their root causes in workflows, helping users move the needle on DORA metrics. GitLab’s transparent product roadmap prioritizes actionable analytics to optimize users’ value stream and DevOps return on investment (ROI).
Deployment frequency charts and monitoring
Enables development teams to monitor the efficiency of deployments over time, find bottlenecks, and know when to make improvements with deployment frequency charts
CI/CD dashboard
Measure the efficiency of your development lifecycle with new charts showing lead time for changes — from code commit to production — built into the GitLab CI/CD Dashboard.
Security and compliance for visibility and risk mitigation
To stay competitive, businesses need to be able to deliver modern applications quickly while also not compromising on security and compliance best practices.
Development teams must collaborate closely with their security team counterparts in order to find, triage, and address security vulnerabilities early in the DevOps lifecycle.
Built-in application security testing and compliance frameworks enable businesses to mitigate risk while maintaining development velocity.
The GitLab 14 DevOps Platform empowers
- Development teams to efficiently create secure code
- Security teams to have better visibility into their security risk
- Compliance teams to have auditability from the first line of code to applications deployed in production
Security and compliance features include
Fuzz Testing
GitLab has shifted fuzz testing left into the heart of developers’ CI/CD workflow, through acquisitions of Fuzzit and Peach Tech, adding both coverage-guided and behavioral fuzz testing to its application security testing capabilities.
This enables developers to discover software defects that may lead to exploitable vulnerabilities missed by traditional testing practices.
Security Dashboards and Vulnerability Reports
GitLab’s Vulnerability Management has evolved into comprehensive Security Dashboards and Vulnerability Reports streamlining organizational overhead of security risk management.
Gitlab 14 is enabling collaboration between development and security teams while increasing DevOps efficiency and velocity.
Modern vulnerability scanning
To provide the latest techniques in application security scanning, GitLab has partnered with the Semgrep and Trivy communities for access to the open source security community.
These partnerships will increase the depth of GitLab’s shift left security approach and empower GitLab users to connect to the broader community helping everyone be more secure.
Compliance pipeline configurations
For organizations needing to implement compliance requirements in their DevOps workflow, GitLab provides the ability to enforce even more separation of duties by setting up immutable pipeline definitions for their specific compliance framework needs.
Availability of the GitLab 14 DevOps platform
GitLab 14.0 release will be available starting June 22nd. To update a self-hosted instance, visit about.gitlab.com/update for detailed instructions.
GitLab continually iterates on its platform, earning its acknowledgment as a leading, single application for the DevOps lifecycle. GitLab delivers customer-driven product innovation through open collaboration and contributions from the community.
GitLab is Leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Agile Planning Tools, and as a Challenger in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Application Security Testing.
Reactions from Gitlab peers and stakeholders
“This partnership provides both Aqua and GitLab users access to the comprehensive security tools they need to successfully shift left.”
“GitLab has access to the best in open source container scanning, while Aqua benefits from GitLab’s Vulnerability Research and GitLab’s contributions to Aqua’s Trivy project.”
“We’re looking forward to GitLab leveraging additional open source projects, like Aqua Starboard, to better schedule scan jobs in production environments,” said Technology Partner, Itay Shakury, director of open source at Aqua Security.
“I’ve been contributing to GitLab for more than three years and I still learn every day by collaborating with the GitLab team and the wider community.”
“Besides the technical knowledge gained during code reviews, one can learn a lot from the transparent design and engineering workflows behind GitLab.”
“Contributing to GitLab has been a catalyst for shaping the way I work with remote teams.” – Contributor, George Tsiolis, product designer at Gitpod
“The biggest value (of GitLab) is that it allows the development teams to have a greater role in the deployment process where previously, only a few people really knew how things worked.”
“Pretty much the whole development organization knows how the CI pipeline works, can work with it, add new services, and get things into production without infrastructure bottlenecks,” says Dan Bereczki, a customer and director of engineering at The Zebra.
