See Automated Software Delivery
The page below is intended to align GitLab sales and marketing efforts with a single source of truth for our go-to-market efforts around Automated Software Delivery.
| Product Marketing | Technical Marketing |
|---|---|
| Heather Simpson (@heather) | Itzik Gan Baruch (@iganbaruch) |
Automated Software Delivery allows organizations to automate manual, repetitive tasks from their SDLC to improve the overall velocity of the software factory and increase collaboration across dev and ops. This includes both application and infrastructure automation.
Automated Software Delivery allows Elite performers to (as per State of DevOps 2021 report)
The opportunity is huge. As per the GitLab DevSecOps survey 2021 -
Cloud transformation and application modernization is a key CIO initiative for 2022
The persona interested in application automation is generally different from the persona interested in infrastructure automation and continuous delivery. Application automation interest comes from development or engineering organizations while infrastructure automation and continuous delivery interest comes from the operations, systems, infrastructure, platform and cloud side of the organization.
| Enterprise | Mid Market | SMB | |
|---|---|---|---|
| User Persona | SCM/CI-> Developer, team lead, DevOps Engineer CD-> DevOps engineer, app operator, sys admin, release manager, platform engineer |
SCM/CI-> Developer, team lead, DevOps Engineer CD-> DevOps engineer, app operator, sys admin, release manager, platform engineer |
varies |
| Buyer Persona | CIO / CTO at C level SCM/CI -> Mgr / Director - App Dev CD -> Mgr / Director - Infra/Ops |
CIO / CTO at C level SCM/CI -> Mgr / Director - App Dev CD -> Mgr / Director - Infra/Ops |
varies |
| Tech Stack | Includes GitHub, Perforce, Jenkins, BitBucket, Subversion, ArgoCD, Harness | Includes GitHub, Perforce, Jenkins, BitBucket, Bamboo, Subversion, ArgoCD, Harness OR the absence of a tech stack OR freemium version of GitLab / GitHub | Absence of tech stack OR freemium version of GitLab / GitHub |
| Infra / Cloud Provider / Deploy Targets | AWS or GCP or internal data center or Kubernetes | AWS or GCP (or none) or Kubernetes | AWS or GCP (or none) or Kubernetes |
| Additional Criteria | - Automation a key initiative - merger & acquisition - consolidation of CI-CD solutions - increased hiring and projects - hiring new CIO, App Dev, Infra teams |
- Automation a key initiative - increased hiring and projects - hiring new CIO, App Dev, Infra teams |
- increased hiring and projects - adoption of new cloud/technologies |
| Business Driver | - Digital Transformation - Cloud Transformation - Application Modernization - Automated Software Delivery |
- Cloud Transformation - Application Modernization - Automated Software Delivery |
- Cloud Transformation - Application Modernization - Automated Software Delivery |
| Challenges "before scenarios" | So What? "negative consequences" |
|---|---|
| Manual processes, lack of standardization | Highly inefficient and error prone processes |
| Employee dissatisfaction due to manual and repetitive processes | Employee churn, inability to hire & retain talent |
| Fragile, complex pipelines are tough to maintain | Requires expert, expensive team members who become a single point of failure |
| Adoption of new technologies not fast enough | Requires new tools, expertise for managing new technologies |
| Infrastructure configuration not fast enough or repeatable | Lack of standardization and automation leads to higher downtime and errors |
| Lack of scalable review and authorization processes | Highly skilled workers doing menial tasks - leading to dissatisfaction |
| Lack of safe deployment options and traceability | Longer time to repair, downtime and customer perception issues |
| Desired Future State (“After Scenarios”) | So What? (“Positive Business Outcomes”) |
|---|---|
| Faster time to value with automation and standardization of testing, review, packaging, release and deployment | Automation to focus on “real work”, less risk, improved employee satisfaction |
| Faster mean time to repair with better traceability and deployment options | Reduce customer perception issues, downtime, improve retention |
| Faster adoption of cloud native technologies | Cloud native first development along with current deployment targets for more flexibility using a single tool |
| Better employee satisfaction | Improved automation, removal of manual / repetitive tasks and reduce integration work improves employee satisfaction |
| Required capability | Customer Metrics |
|---|---|
| Test automation, pipeline configuration management | Automation to focus on “real work”, less risk, improved employee satisfaction |
| Change control and collaboration | Reduce customer perception issues, downtime, improve retention |
| Safe deployment and roll back | Cloud native first development along with current deployment targets for more flexibility using a single tool |
| Code quality, peer reviews | Improved automation, removal of manual / repetitive tasks and reduce integration work improves employee satisfaction |
These value statements are used to measure of GitLab Adoption by the customer and provide guidance to our field teams (CSMs in particular) for conversations on expanding usage.
| Area | Measure | Value |
|---|---|---|
| CI Utilization | Depth of CI Adoption as a percentage of licensed seats | - Increase build speeds. Development teams work more efficiently by reducing otherwise manual work. - Catch potential errors sooner rather than later before they intensify. - Maximize development time and improves productivity. Less manual work. - Faster feedback and less risk that changes cause builds to break. - Gives teams more flexibility, making it easier to adopt. - Reduces business risk and protects intellectual property. Instills confidence in end-users. |
| Container Registry | Container registry enabled | - Centralize the publication and consumption of container images - Standardize on authentication methods and authorization models throughout your software lifecycle - Eliminate the need to store & rotate credentials for third-party systems (i.e. leverage CI Job Tokens with Gitlab CI to authenticate) - Ensure standardized use of cloud object storage to limit attack surface (eg. avoid leaks through open S3 buckets) - Improve visibility and control over cloud storage utilization on a per-project/per-group basis (i.e. through storage quotas, expiration policies, and usage reporting) |
| Templates | The number of instance-wide template repositories that exist in an instance | - Proliferate best-practices approaches through easily reusable pipeline templates - Promote innersourcing and collaboration through the use of templates - Speed time to green pipeline by providing new projects a well defined starting point - Improve compliance with required reporting, or other important pipeline tasks (test coverage, linting, scanning, etc.) |
| Deployments Utilization | Depth of Deployment adoption as a percentage of licensed seats | - Faster time to value with automation and standardization of testing, review, packaging, release and deployment - Faster mean time to repair with better traceability and deployment options - Cloud native first development along with current deployment targets for more flexibility using a single tool |
| Deployment Count per User L28D | Deployment Count per User (last 28 days) - Number of deployments within last 28D divided by number of licensed users |
- Faster time to value with automation and standardization of testing, review, packaging, release and deployment - Faster mean time to repair with better traceability and deployment options - Cloud native first development along with current deployment targets for more flexibility using a single tool |
| Value Stream analytics | How many users went to the VSA page in the last 28 days | - VSA helps businesses identify and target waste and inefficiencies, and take action to optimize those workstreams to deliver the highest possible velocity of value. - GitLab's one platform approach ensures a single platform, workspace and data model which creates a shared view of actionable insights, of your end to end software delivery lifecycle |
Automated Software Delivery with GitLab enables your teams to eliminate manual and repetitive tasks to improve velocity of your SDLC, deliver high quality applications at-scale - particularly essential for cloud-native applications, and improve collaboration between dev and ops. Automated Software Delivery is typically the starting point of your DevOps Platform journey.
“It just worked. That was the biggest success because we didn’t have any problems with installing GitLab, with updating it and it was really simple to start for us,” [MGA]
"As per the Forrester Total Economic Impact study, customers were able to eliminate at least 3 tools per year" TEI
"GitLab integrates natively with Kubernetes, which gives the development team peace of mind because they can trust that the tool will work automatically without constant maintenance." - Hotjar
"Our DevOps teams can provision production-ready solutions within minutes, from Kubernetes to multi-cloud and multi-tier complex hybrid cloud infrastructures" - SURF
"If something goes wrong, GitLab offers a simple fix. For example, if we deployed the wrong ratio of our services to the server, we can see the history, read the commit message, and identify the author to roll back commits" - Parimatch
"Developer happiness matters because happy developers simply do better work. You need to keep your developer experience at a high level because that’s the only way you really can deliver value fast. GitLab has played … a significant part in helping us increase our developer experience.” - Moneyfarm
Apart from the single application, DevOps Platform narrative, there are a number of key areas which GitLab does well and better than competitors.
| Differentiator | Description |
|---|---|
| Multi-platform | Execute builds on Unix, Windows, OSX, and any other platform that supports Go |
| Multi-language | Build scripts work with Java, PHP, Ruby, C, and any other language |
| Multi-deployment targets | Deploy to embedded systems, on-premise servers, Raspberry Pi devices, mainframes, virtual machines, Kubernetes clusters, FaaS offerings, multiple clouds like AWS, GCP, Azure, IBM and Oracle |
| Faster builds | GitLab splits builds over multiple machines for parallel execution |
| Autoscaling | Automatically spin up and down VM's or Kubernetes pods to make sure your builds get processed immediately while minimizing costs |
| Versioned tests | a .gitlab-ci.yml file that contains your tests, allowing developers to contribute changes and ensuring every branch gets the tests it needs |
| Flexible Pipelines | Define multiple jobs per stage and even trigger other pipelines |
| Ease test environment creation | With the review app - use custom Docker images, spin up services as part of testing, build new Docker images, run on Kubernetes - use this to run UX tests, DAST, usability tests etc |
| Built in Container Registry | built-in container registry to store, share, and use container images |
| Distributed version control | Reduced time to clone and fetch large repos for geographically distributed teams |
| Product development management | Version control not just source code but also IP, graphic assets, animations and binaries to mention a few |
| Unified deployment and observability | Visualise what goes into production (Review apps and release planning), what to deploy to production (feature flags) , who to deploy it to (Progressive Delivery and deployment strategies like Canary), monitor performance of deployment (via browser performance testing, performance monitoring/tracing) and rollback based on performance via post deployment monitoring, all from a single application |
| Secure Kubernetes Cluster access | Avoid exposing your cluster by establishing a secure connection with your Kubernetes cluster for your CI/CD jobs |
| Push and pull based deployments | Majority of customers still prefer the control that push based deployment gives, we support both |
From a competitive comparison for Automated Software Delivery, the following are the key competitors and what they are lacking at a high level. Review the detailed comparison in the devops-tools comparison pages
| Objection | Response |
|---|---|
| “I don’t need another tool to replace my existing tool” | - We can meet you where you are - you don’t need to rip and replace all your existing tools - You can start by supplementing GitLab CI or CD or SCM with your existing toolset of Jira, GitHub, Jenkins etc - Once you find value in the specific area (e.g., SCM, CI, CD, Security, Compliance) - you can expand your use of GitLab to achieve better ROI |
| “I don’t want to be locked into one company for my entire DevOps lifecycle” | - Toolchain sprawl is a reality - many customers have stopped benefitting from DevOps due to this - Application & resource integration & management actually hinders how fast the organization can move. - Customers partner with GitLab to accelerate time to market for new products/services, improve efficiencies & reduce security & compliance risks. Walk me through how your priorities align with these outcomes. |
| “Each development team decides what they need” | - Allowing each team to decide creates silos of innovation & development. It also significantly limits the impact of your digital transformation. - Each team then also needs to setup, integrate and maintain these integrations. - Describe how this works for you. How many tools have you spent money on as a result? |
As organizations get started and grow in their automation journey, GitLab Premium offers Faster Code Reviews, Advanced CI/CD, Release Controls and Self-managed reliability with expert support to enhance team productivity and collaboration. GitLab Premium adds enterprise level features like priority support, upgrade assistance and a technical account managers (for eligible accounts).
For up-to-date and full list of value at Premium, visit Why Premium. Some key features include (based on highest Post Purchase Survey Results):
Most of the value of the Automated Software Delivery Solution is available to customers at the GitLab Premium tier. GitLab Ultimate adds Security, Compliance, Portfolio and Value Stream Management - which are covered by other solution areas.
For up-to-date list of value at Ultimate, visit Why Premium.
| Company | Problem | Solution | Result |
| Goldman Sachs | Needed to increase developer efficiency & software quality | GitLab Premium (CI/CD, SCM) | Improved 2 builds/day to 1000+/day; simplified workflow & administration |
| Sopra Steria | Needed to standardize a tool for DevOps with single authorization | GitLab Premium (CI/CD, SCM) | Less than 6 minute builds, deploying to AWS, GCP, Azure |
| Wag! | Slow release process taking over 40 minutes | GitLab Ultimate (CI, CD) | Release process reduced to 6 minutes; 8 releases per day with built-in security; a full deployment pipeline to Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) |
| ANWB | Prolonged outages, long time to debug toolset integrations | GitLab Premium (CI, CD) | Setup for cloud transformation - Google Cloud on K8S |
| Ticketmaster | Slow build process prevented innovation | GitLab Premium (CI) | 15x faster - from over 2 hours to 8 minute builds; faster releases and better customer experiences (5 star app reviews) |
| Hotjar | Legacy systems, maintenance of tool integration, slow adoption of cloud technologies | GitLab Premium (Ci, CD) | 50% faster deployments, 30% faster build times, 2-15 deploys per day |
| Paessler | Large complex pipelines, slow feedback loop | GitLab Premium (Ci, CD) | 75% faster build times, testing from 45 min to 15 min |
More case studies here -> Filter by Usecase CI or CD or SCM or GitOps to find the latest case studies in the case study board
GitLab Professional Services help customers become efficient in GitLab quickly. GitLab (or a GitLab partner) offers a number of service offerings to support customers.
Here are some service offerings you can position with the customer:
Advisory/Consulting services to help with GitOps rollout are planned to be rolled out later this year. Please register your interest for a GitOps Advisory offering here to help PS effectively prioritize!
As you position services, you can use our Services Pitch Deck to help establsh the value of engaging with PS. Other services can be found in our Complete list of professional service offerings
Talk with @em in the professional services slack channel to learn more.