Blog News Beyond source code management: 1 billion pipelines of CI/CD innovation
Published on: October 4, 2023
6 min read

Beyond source code management: 1 billion pipelines of CI/CD innovation

GitLab recently reached a major CI/CD milestone - find out what this means for customer innovation.

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Our DevSecOps journey began with a clear vision: to empower developers and organizations with a unified platform for simplifying the software development lifecycle. Today, GitLab enables thousands of organizations to accelerate value delivery by going beyond source code management and enhancing the CI/CD capabilities of our AI-powered DevSecOps platform. We recently achieved a significant milestone demonstrating how this innovation drives customer success – 1 billion pipelines have now run on GitLab's SaaS-based DevSecOps Platform.

From healthcare to finance, e-commerce to education, our platform has become the backbone of digital transformation journeys worldwide. Every day, more and more customers like Lockheed Martin, Carfax, Hackerone, and Deutsche Telekom are benefitting from GitLab's CI/CD, which automates the building, testing, packaging, securing, and deploying of code, starting at their first commit. With GitLab, they deliver better code and faster releases – fewer bugs and more time spent on new features.

Test-drive CI/CD today with a free trial of GitLab Ultimate.

Customer-driven innovation

GitLab delivers customer-driven innovation through collaboration and contributions from the community and customers. In addition, as GitLab is developed using GitLab, we are able to identify and tackle the same issues our customers face. Let’s look at some of the critical advancements in GitLab CI/CD.

Dealing with time-to-market pressures

Time-to-market is critical in today's fast-paced economic environment. GitLab's CI/CD pipelines accelerate the software delivery process, enabling organizations to respond swiftly to market demands. By incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) across the software development lifecycle, GitLab helps organizations improve productivity, enabling them to develop, secure, and deploy software even faster. Our new GitLab Duo AI capabilities further improve productivity and efficiency, including:

  • Code Suggestions, which helps with faster code creation
  • Suggested Reviewers, which expedites code reviews and approvals
  • Vulnerability summary, which aids with rapid vulnerability remediation
  • Value stream forecasting, which predicts future team efficiency

“Time to market was a big issue for us. Before our transformation to Agile and DevOps started, we had release cycles of nearly 18 months in some cases. We've been able to dramatically reduce that to roughly 3 months." Thorsten Bastian, Business Owner IT, CI/CD Hub, Telekom IT, Deutsche Telekom

Get to know GitLab's CI/CD capabilities with this demo.

Facing security vulnerabilities head-on

Security is seamlessly integrated into the CI/CD pipeline within the natural workflow of developers, enabling them to detect vulnerabilities early. Security scans, including static application security testing (SAST) and dynamic application security testing (DAST), are incorporated directly into the CI/CD pipeline, helping to ensure that every release is secure by design. Security checks become integral to the development process, reducing the risk of vulnerabilities delaying releases. GitLab enables compliance teams to apply relevant controls and governance frameworks. Recently, we launched new capabilities to centralize policy management, expand reports and controls, and enhance our compliance dashboards.

“GitLab is helping us catch security flaws early and it's integrated it into the developer's flow. An engineer can push code to GitLab CI, get that immediate feedback from one of many cascading audit steps, and see if there's a security vulnerability built in there, and even build their own new step that might test a very specific security issue.” Mitch Trale, Head of Infrastructure, HackerOne

Learn how to use vulnerability management tools in your environment with this demo.

Dealing with developer productivity and toolchain complexity

GitLab helps organizations build a framework for platform engineering to create golden paths to standardize, scale, and secure workflows.

Establishing these golden paths helps combat cognitive overload and the trend of "you build it, you run it," which have taken a toll on developer productivity and happiness. Golden paths also support consistent application of policies across the organization, addressing the challenges that arise when different teams use different processes and tools. GitLab includes capabilities like templates, inheritance rules, infrastructure as code, and remote development that benefit DevSecOps teams by reducing time to onboard new developers, improving workflow efficiency and collaboration, and supporting workspace flexibility.

“It seems that everything is just cleaner now when moving code to production. We’re putting out more new product features because teams are spending more time creating code than making sure their pipelines are running. When we go to commonize our CI/CD pipelines, we can move them (workloads to the cloud) with a common on-ramp that makes it easier.” Mark Portofe, Director of Platform Engineering, CARFAX

Hear Mark Portofe from CARFAX walk through their journey of establishing golden paths to improve developer productivity with GitLab.

Looking ahead

GitLab remains committed to pushing the boundaries of what's possible in CI/CD. We continue to innovate and provide you with the tools and capabilities you need to stay ahead in a rapidly evolving tech landscape. Here are some of the key capabilities we are excited to roll out in the coming months:

  • CI/CD catalog to create discoverable, shareable, and accessible building blocks that promote reuse and innersourcing and support scalable DevSecOps processes
  • Customizable roles to implement customizable separation of duties policies
  • AI capabilities like Code Suggestions extended to self-managed deployments and GitLab Duo Chat to provide a context-aware assistant for developers to enhance their productivity
  • Comprehensive and centralized policy management that combines the flexibility of compliance pipelines with the user experience of scan execution policies into a single solution

GitLab was named a Leader in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for DevOps Platforms. We believe this recognizes our role in helping customers streamline their software delivery process and deliver software faster. Download the report to learn more.

You can try CI/CD today with a free trial of GitLab Ultimate.

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for DevOps Platforms, Manjunath Bhat, Thomas Murphy, Et al., 05 June 2023. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, and MAGIC QUADRANT is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Disclaimer: This blog contains information related to upcoming products, features, and functionality. It is important to note that the information in this blog post is for informational purposes only. Please do not rely on this information for purchasing or planning purposes. As with all projects, the items mentioned in this blog and linked pages are subject to change or delay. The development, release, and timing of any products, features, or functionality remain at the sole discretion of GitLab.

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