Lockheed Martin launched its 1LMX initiative to transform its end-to-end business processes and systems. One focus of the transformation was to pare down the company’s wide variety of DevOps tools – each program or product line at Lockheed Martin had its own toolchain. To mitigate this issue, drive rapid production, and increase collaboration, Lockheed Martin adopted GitLab’s DevSecOps Platform, run on AWS.
“GitLab has strengthened our 1LMX transformation, upgrading the way we collaborate and innovate to develop software. Now, all of our programs have access to a high-quality software development environment,” said Alan Hohn, Lockheed Martin’s Director of Software Strategy.
GitLab’s DevSecOps Platform enables Lockheed Martin to ship software more efficiently and securely for thousands of their programs, ranging from satellite platforms and aerospace systems to ground control software and maritime surface and subsurface software.
Here are some top-level benefits that Lockheed Martin has seen with GitLab’s DevSecOps Platform:
- Using GitLab’s single platform, Lockheed Martin’s legacy projects are delivered to testing every six days, down from a monthly cadence using distributed toolchains.
- Developers experienced a 90% reduction in time spent on system maintenance.
- The organization has seen 200% annual growth in adoption of The DevSecOps Platform.
- AWS enabled automated Infrastructure as Code for a scalable and resilient cloud architecture.
Efficiency gains
In migrating to GitLab, Lockheed Martin has realized a number of benefits and eliminated obstacles. In three and a half years, Lockheed Martin has created 64,000 projects on GitLab, and created 110,000 continuous integration builds daily.
Additionally, they were able to retire thousands of separately maintained servers thereby reducing time spent on maintenance by 90%. GitLab further enables internal efficiency within the organization by allowing teams to securely share reusable code components in globally accessible environments. Since implementing GitLab, Lockheed Martin teams have added 18 new repositories a day for the past two years.
How GitLab, AWS, and Lockheed Martin work together
In 2022, after rapid adoption of GitLab created the need for a more scalable solution, Lockheed Martin, GitLab, and AWS worked together to automate and optimize Lockheed Martin's code deployment across the enterprise.
The solution started with a well-architected review of the design between Lockheed Martin, AWS, and GitLab. AWS then helped to automate and optimize the Lockheed Martin GitLab deployment for continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) environment by delivering Infrastructure as Code to deploy the environment in two hours vs. several hours previously.
The AWS team also established workflows to deliver a fully automated, highly available, disaster recovery-compliant, scalable architecture for GitLab enabling a consistent process that runs without manual intervention.
AWS supported load balancing to auto-scale the deployment process based on developer demand for pipeline runs and user traffic so that developers are not waiting on their deployments to execute. Pre-migration testing was performed to establish baselines, followed by post-migration testing to measure performance and scalability gains in delivering faster deployments.
Additionally, monitoring and security controls were implemented to comply with Lockheed Martin policies. As a result, the team was able to deliver operational efficiencies with the number of build requests waiting to be processed decreasing from 200 to zero, and reduced time for code deployment across the enterprise.
This effort showcased how large enterprises with thousands of software developers can build and deploy automated, scalable, and resilient code pipelines in the cloud using platforms such as GitLab by leveraging AWS best practices.
GitLab’s Chief Product Officer David DeSanto added, “For more than a century, Lockheed Martin has set the standard for innovation within the public sector, and demonstrates what is possible when organizations invest in digital transformation efforts.”
Lockheed Martin has 20,000 GitLab users, and is looking to double that number and migrate even more of their projects over to The DevSecOps Platform in the coming years. To dig deeper into how Lockheed Martin uses GitLab, read our case study, and to learn more about GitLab for the Public Sector, visit our site.
