GitLab Direction

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Structure

This page describes the direction and roadmap for GitLab. It's organized from the short to the long term.

Your contributions

GitLab's direction is determined by GitLab the company, and the code that is sent by our contributors. We continually merge code to be released in the next version. Contributing is the best way to get a feature you want included.

On our issue tracker for CE and EE, many requests are made for features and changes to GitLab. Issues with the Accepting Merge Requests label are pre-approved as something we're willing to add to GitLab. Of course, before any code is merged it still has to meet our contribution acceptance criteria.

What our customers want

See our product handbook on how we prioritize.

How we plan releases

At GitLab, we strive to be ambitious, maintain a strong sense of urgency, and set aspirational targets with every release. This means that we schedule more items for each release than may be delivered, with the recognition that we may only deliver about 70% of what we aimed for.

Previous releases

On our releases page you can find an overview of the most important features of recent releases and links to the blog posts for each release.

Future releases

GitLab releases a new version every single month on the 22nd. Note that we often move things around, do things that are not listed, and cancel things that are listed.

This page is always in draft, meaning some of the things here might not ever be in GitLab. New Starter, Premium, and Ultimate features are indicated with labels. This is our best estimate of where new features will land, but is in no way definitive.

The list is an outline of tentpole features – the most important features of upcoming releases – and doesn't include most contributions from volunteers outside the company. This is not an authoritative list of upcoming releases - it only reflects current milestones.

11.4 (22-Oct)

Manage

Plan

Create

Verify

Release

Configure

Monitor

Secure

11.5 (22-Nov)

Manage

Plan

Create

Verify

Package

Release

Configure

Monitor

Secure

11.6 (22-Dec)

Manage

Plan

Create

Verify

Release

Configure

Monitor

Secure

11.7 (22-Jan)

Manage

Plan

Create

Verify

Release

Configure

Secure

11.8 (22-Feb)

Plan

Create

Verify

Release

Secure

12.0 (22-Mar)

Plan

Create

Verify

Release

12.2 (22-May)

Plan

2019 Q2

Verify

Release

2019 Q3

Verify

Release

2019 (22-Dec)

Monitor

2019 Q4

Verify

Release

Starter

Starter features are available to anyone with an Enterprise Edition subscription (Starter, Premium, Ultimate).

Premium

Premium features are only available to Premium (and Ultimate) subscribers.

Ultimate

Ultimate is for organisations that have a need to build secure, compliant software and that want to gain visibility of - and be able to influence - their entire organisation from a high level. Ultimate features are only be available to Ultimate subscribers.

Moonshots

Moonshots are big hairy audacious goals that may take a long time to deliver.

Scope

Our vision is to replace disparate DevOps toolchains with a single integrated application that is pre-configured to work by default across the entire DevOps lifecycle. Inside our scope are the 9 stages of the DevOps lifecycle. Consider viewing the presentation of our plan for 2018.

We try to prevent maintaining functionality that is language or platform specific because they slow down our ability to get results. Examples of how we handle it instead are:

  1. We don't make native mobile clients, we make sure our mobile web pages are great.
  2. We don't make native clients for desktop operating systems, people can use Tower and for example GitLab was the first to have merge conflict resolution in our web applications.
  3. For language translations we rely on the wider community.
  4. For Static Application Security Testing we rely on open source security scanners.
  5. For code navigation we're hesitant to introduce navigation improvements that only work for a subset of languages.
  6. For code quality we reuse Codeclimate Engines.
  7. For building and testing with Auto DevOps we use Heroku Buildpacks.

Outside our scope are:

  1. Network (fabric) Flannel, Openflow, VMware NSX, Cisco ACI
  2. Proxy (layer 7) Envoy, nginx, HAProxy, traefik
  3. Ingress (north/south) Contour, Ambassador,
  4. Service mesh (east/west) Istio, Linkerd
  5. Container Scheduler we mainly focus on Kubernetes, other container schedulers are: CloudFoundry, OpenStack, OpenShift, Mesos DCOS, Docker Swarm, Atlas/Terraform, Nomad, Deis, Convox, Flynn, Tutum, GiantSwarm, Rancher
  6. Package manager Helm, ksonnet
  7. Operating System Ubuntu, CentOS, RHEL, CoreOS, Alpine Linux

Product strategy

Our goal is to make it faster and easier for groups of people (organisations, open source projects) to bring value to their customers. This is measureable:

We're able to do this by providing a single application that plays well with others for teams of any size with any kind of projects, while giving you actionable feedback.

Vision

From development teams to marketing organizations, everyone needs to collaborate on digital content. Content should be open to suggestions by a wide number of potential contributors. Open contribution can be achieved by using a mergeable file format and distributed version control. The vision of GitLab is to allow everyone to collaborate on all digital content so people can cooperate effectively and achieve better results, faster.

Ideas flow though many stages before they are realized. An idea originates in a chat discussion, an issue is created, it is planned in a sprint, coded in an IDE, committed to version control, tested by CI, code reviewed, deployed, monitored, and documented. Stitching all these stages of the DevOps lifecycle together can be done in many different ways. You can have a marketplace of proprietary apps from different suppliers or use a suite of products developed in isolation. We believe that a single application for the DevOps lifecycle based on convention over configuration offers a superior user experience. The advantage can be quoted from the Wikipedia page for convention over configuration: "decrease the number of decisions that developers need to make, gaining simplicity, and not necessarily losing flexibility". In GitLab you only have to specify unconventional aspects of your workflow. The happy path is frictionless from planning to monitoring.

We admire other convention over configuration tools like Ruby on Rails (that doctrine of which perfectly describe the value of integrated systems), Ember, and Heroku, and strive to offer the same advantages for a continuous delivery of software.

Furthermore, Ruby on Rails has been of massive influence to the Ruby community. Uplifting it, and making it more powerful and useful than ever before, for many more usecases. We want GitLab to be to Kubernetes, what Rails is to Ruby.

Product vision 2018

There is a separate page for our Product Vision for GitLab at the end of 2018.

Product vision 2019+

Read the blog post on GitLab's product vision for 2019 and beyond.

Product vision background

Read the blog post on the background to GitLab's product vision.

DevOps stages

There are individual vision pages and roadmaps for each stage in the DevOps lifecycle and the two stages that span the lifecycle. Click on ones of the stages to see the vision for the stage.

DevOps Lifecycle

Manage Plan Create Verify Package Release Configure Monitor Secure

Product Categories

Manage Plan Create Verify Package Release Configure Monitor Secure
Roadmap Roadmap Roadmap Roadmap Roadmap Roadmap Roadmap Roadmap Roadmap
Vision Vision Vision Vision Vision Vision Vision Vision Vision

Topics

Actionable feedback

Deployments should never be fire and forget. GitLab will give you immediate feedback on every deployment on any scale. This means that GitLab can tell you whether performance has improved on the application level, but also whether business metrics have changed.

Concretely, we can split up monitoring and feedback efforts within GitLab in three distinct areas: execution (cycle analytics), business and system feedback.

Business feedback

With the power of monitoring and an integrated approach, we have the ability to do amazing things within GitLab. GitLab will be able to automatically test commits and versions through feature flags and A/B testing.

Business feedback exists on different levels:

Application feedback

You application should perform well after changes are made. GitLab will be able to see whether a change is causing errors or performance issues on application level. Think about:

System feedback

We can now go beyond CI and CD. GitLab will able to tell you whether a change improved performance or stability. Because it will have access to both historical data on performance and code, it can show you the impact of any particular change at any time.

System feedback happens over different time windows:

Execution feedback & Cycle Analytics

GitLab is able to speed up cycle time for any project. To provide feedback on cycle time GitLab will continue to expand cycle analytics so that it not only shows you what is slow, it’ll help you speed up with concrete, clickable suggestions.

Why cycle time is important

The ability to monitor, visualize and improve upon cycle time (or: time to value) is fundamental to GitLab's product. A shorter cycle time will allow you to:

When we're adding new capabilities to GitLab, we tend to focus on things that will reduce the cycle time for our customers. This is why we choose convention over configuration and why we focus on automating the entire software development lifecycle.

All friction of setting up a new project and building the pipeline of tools you need to ship any kind of software should disappear when using GitLab.

Plays well with others

We understand that not everyone will use GitLab for everything all the time, especially when first adopting GitLab. We want you to use more of GitLab because you love that part of GitLab. GitLab plays well with others, even when you use only one part of GitLab it should be a great experience.

GitLab ships with built-in integrations to many popular applications. We aspire to have the worlds best integrations for Slack, JIRA, and Jenkins.

Many other applications integrate with GitLab, and we are open to adding new integrations to our applications page. New integrations with GitLab can very in richness and complexity; from a simple webhook, and all the way to a Project Service.

GitLab welcomes and supports new integrations to be created to extend collaborations with other products. GitLab plays well with others by providing APIs for nearly anything you can do within GitLab. GitLab can be a provider of authentication for external applications. And of course GitLab is open source so people are very welcome to add anything that they are missing. If you are don't have time to contribute and am a customer we gladly work with you to design the API addition or integration you need.

Enterprise editions

GitLab comes in 4 editions:

ML/AI at GitLab

Machine learning (ML) through neural networks is a really great tool to solve hard to define, dynamic problems. Right now, GitLab doesn't use any machine learning technologies, but we expect to use them in the near future for several types of problems:

Signal / noise separation

Signal detection is very hard in an noisy environment. GitLab plans to use ML to warn users of any signals that stand out against the background noise in several features:

Recommendation engines

Automatically categorizing and labelling is risky. Modern models tend to overfit, e.g. resulting in issues with too many labels. However, similar models can be used very well in combination with human interaction in the form of recommendation engines.

Smart behavior

Because of their great ability to recognize patterns, neural networks are an excellent tool to help with scaling, and anticipating needs. In GitLab, we can imagine:

Code quality

Similar to DeepScan.

Code navigation

Similar to Sourcegraph.

Quarterly Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)

To make sure our goals are clearly defined and aligned throughout the organization, we make use of OKR's (Objective Key Results). Our quarterly Objectives and Key Results are publicly viewable.

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