Our customers are experiencing a significant increase in the efficiency and pace of software development with GitLab Duo, our suite of AI capabilities powering your workflow. This will likely correspond to a rise in the two DORA metrics that measure velocity: deployment frequency and lead time for changes. However, what may not be as obvious is that the age of AI-powered software development has also ushered in a new era of large-scale computing for CI/CD jobs. Organizations will need to learn how to support this CI/CD hyperscale.
What is CI/CD hyperscale?
As a quick recap, a CI/CD job is a unit of work that is executed on a host computing system each time a developer pushes a code change to a project repository. This core guiding principle has accelerated value creation by software development teams over the past few years. Instead of focusing on the ceremonies of legacy project management, today’s leading software development teams deliver value by adding small increments to a software product regularly – weekly, daily, and even hourly.
The CI/CD engine supports this modern pattern of software product development by enabling development teams to define automation to continuously build, test, and integrate any new software change. Some of our larger customers who have transformed their software development practices have already attained what we at GitLab have labeled as CI/CD hyperscale. That is, they are typically running 3 million or more CI/CD jobs per month.
How to support AI-fueled CI/CD growth
With the advent of AI-powered DevSecOps, we hypothesize that, starting in 2024, organizations will see a 2x increase per year in the number of CI/CD jobs run by development teams leveraging AI-assisted features across the software development lifecycle. Starting with 3 million jobs per month as the baseline and assuming a 2% growth rate per month, the chart below illustrates the potential impact in the growth of CI/CD jobs monthly due to efficiency gains with AI-powered DevSecOps.
So, what steps can you take to ensure your organization is positioned for success in this hyper-competitive new age of AI-powered DevSecOps?
Here are a few pointers to get you started:
- Analyze whether you have enabled your development teams – the creators of value – with the flexibility to adopt modern patterns in software product development.
- Inventory the tools you use to support creative work, including project and task management.
- Inventory the tools you use for software development and DevOps. Are you using multiple types of CI systems across your environment? If so, the next step is to gain a deeper understanding of why that is.
- Create a plan to migrate all software development teams from multiple point solutions to one DevSecOps platform.
Your software development teams may have built up extensive tooling using various CI systems and point solutions and may question the return on investment of a potentially time-consuming consolidation and migration effort. However, based on our internal data, customers adopting GitLab realize payback in less than six months.
If you have already adopted the GitLab AI-powered DevSecOps Platform and are consolidating your platform engineering and software development processes, then you are well on your way to unlocking the value of AI-powered software development and having a solution capable of supporting CI/CD hyperscale.
As the pioneer of the integrated DevSecOps platform, we have been at the forefront of supporting CI/CD hyperscale for customers running CI/CD workloads on the fully managed GitLab SaaS CI/CD build environment or their own self-managed build infrastructure. That focused investment over the past decade has resulted in the development of the most scalable and flexible CI/CD engine – the core of the GitLab DevSecOps Platform. Look no further than our milestone of more than 1 billion pipelines run on GitLab's SaaS-based DevSecOps Platform.
So with GitLab CI and GitLab Runner, the ultimate CI/CD execution engine, the GitLab DevSecOps Platform is a solution that provides the foundation to continuously improve and transform your value creation processes while supporting the scale required to meet the competitive demands of the new age of AI.
Learn how to achieve CI/CD hyperscale
If you are new to GitLab and are interested in learning how we can help you transform your software development processes, contact our sales team to help you with a custom demo and get you going on your adoption of AI-powered DevSecOps.
