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| Stage | Verify |
| Maturity | Competitive |
| Content Last Reviewed | 2024-10-22 |
Thanks for visiting this category direction page on Continuous Integration (CI) in GitLab. This page belongs to the Verify Stage and is maintained by Rutvik Shah (E-Mail).
This direction page is a work in progress, and everyone can contribute:
Continuous Integration is an important part of any software development cycle. We recognize a key advantage of GitLab CI is that we can define pipelines as code, while making CI easy to use, reliable, and accurate in terms of its results. We are very proud that we are recognized as a leader in DevOps Platforms in the Gartner Magic Quadrant, as well as a leader in Forrester's most recent and final 2019 Q3 Cloud Native CI Wave, and it's important for us that we continue to innovate in this area and provide not just a "good enough" solution, but a speedy and reliable one.
Making it easy to run a pipeline is our first focus and this applies to both running a pipeline manually as well as triggering one automatically when submitting a code commit or a merge request. In addition, we want to provide data for examining your pipeline's performance, so that you can optimize CI configurations to make your pipelines run more efficiently.
For specific information and features related to authoring and pipelines, check out Pipeline Authoring. For work related to Pipeline Abuse Prevention, see the Category page.
You may also be looking for one of the following related product direction pages: Overall Vision of the Verify stage and GitLab Runner.
Our strategy to regain a category maturity of "Complete" is by delivering features that help our customers realize the orchestration power of GitLab CI by integrating other systems and continue to work on features that power the core CI experience.
In FY25-26, our plan is to help users to deliver software faster and efficiently. This includes:
Integrate seamlessly with other systems and unblocking access to security and compliance features offered by GitLab Platform
a. Ability to call and asynchronously wait for an external system from the pipelines with the focus on FluxCD and Jenkins as primary use cases.
b. Ability to integrate seamlessly with GitHub SCM
Provide a great user experience to locate pipelines and jobs.
We are excited to continue improving the core capabilities of GitLab CI/CD to make it the best-in-class solution for our users. Some key areas we are focusing on in the near-term include:
We are currently focusing on
The top deliverables from the Pipeline Execution group over the last quarter are:
BIC (Best In Class) is an indicator of forecasted near-term market performance based on a combination of factors, including analyst views, market news, and feedback from the sales and product teams. It is critical that we understand where GitLab appears in the BIC landscape.
The majority of CI market conversation is between us, Jenkins, and GitHub Actions at this point. An example of this placement is from Jet Brain's 5th annual Developer Ecosystem Survey which has placed GitLab as #2 CI solution for enterprises. Atlassian has built BitBucket Pipelines, a more modernized version of Bamboo, which is still in the early stages. Microsoft is maintaining (at least for now) Azure DevOps at the same time as GitHub Actions but for personal usage GitHub Actions is gaining traction among developers. CodeFresh and CircleCI have both released container-based plugin model, similar to GitHub Actions. CircleCI in particular is known for very fast startup times and we're looking to ensure we keep up or get even faster. Jenkins is largely seen as a legacy tool, and most people we speak with are interested in moving off to something more modern. We are addressing this with our External CI jobs vision to support a broader CI ecosystem beyond GitLab CI workloads.
From GitHub's 2023 Roadmap, we are seeing GitLab-reminiscent features which include Pull Request Merge Queue, akin to Merge Trains with a fit-finish that we aim to make easier in gitlab#294169. Also to note is an emphasis on governance and controls with Audit Log streaming, bringing parity to the capabilities GitLab has created with the Compliance group's Audit Event streaming.
For Continuous Integration, our "What's Next & Why" are targeting the following personas, as ranked by priority for support:
Our current maturity is at "Competitive" and the next maturity target is "Complete". We will continue to focus on quality and stability as we move forward while providing a way for our users to adopt GitLab CI within their existing ecosystem and differentiate ourselves with a solution that helps debugging pipelines efficient.
There are a few key findings from the Forrester Research analysts on our CI solution. GitLab is seen as capable as the solutions provided by the hyperclouds themselves, and well ahead of other neutral solutions. This can give our users flexibility when it comes to which cloud provider(s) they want to use. We are also seen as the best end to end leader, with other products not keeping up and not providing as comprehensive solutions. What this tells us is that it is important for us to continue to innovate and make it hard or even impossible for competitors to maintain pace. As such, our path to improving our analyst performance matches our solutions above in terms of staying ahead of our competitors.