| Product Marketing | Technical Marketing |
|---|---|
| Cormac Foster and Brian Glanz | William Galindez Arias |
The DevOps Platform use case showcases the benefits of a single, end-to-end platform for DevSecOps–from ideation to value creation and delivery, with complete transparency, traceability, and seamless collaboration throughout the process. It is relevant to customers who have not been able to achieve expected results due to maintaining a hodgepodge of tools and integrations, siloed teams, cultural misalignment, lack of visibility and/or collaboration. In such scenarios, the GitLab value of a single application from idea to production inclusive of monitoring and security is appealing to the customer.
The DevOps Platform is also a vehicle for transformation, allowing businesses to not just reduce the overhead of delivering software, but to anchor initiatives to change the way the company approaches work and collaboration.
The worldwide DevOps market is expected to grow with a growth rate of 20 percent from $3.5 Bn in 2018 to $10.5 Bn in 2024. Increasing adoption of agile frameworks, cloud technologies, and digitization of enterprises to automate business processes are driving the growth. Furthermore, other solution providers and industry analysts have begun to embrace the concept of a DevOps Platform.
In their Market Guide for DevOps Value Stream Delivery Platforms, Gartner's Strategic Planning Assumption was:
“By 2023, 40% of organizations will have switched from multiple point solutions to DevOps value stream delivery platforms to streamline application delivery, versus less than 10% in 2020.”
Market Guide for DevOps Value Stream Delivery Platforms, Manjunath Bhat, Hassan Ennaciri, Chris Saunderson, Daniel Betts, Thomas Murphy, Joachim Herschmann, 28 September 2020
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.
GitLab believes this indicates that the market for a DevOps platform delivered as a single application will grow much faster than the DevOps market as a whole.
While they share a similar name, GitLab's "Open DevOps Platform" brand messaging and the "DevOps Platform" use case are distinct and independent.
"Open DevOps Platform" is high-level brand messaging that describes our company, our product philosophy, and the relationship between the two. It is focused on the positive, transformational outcomes of enaging with the company and using the product.
"DevOps Platform" is a customer use case that describes a discrete customer problem that GitLab solves. The DevOps Platform use case is more targeted and narrowly scoped than the Open DevOps Platform brand messaging, focusing on explaining the benefits of a complete platform, deployed as a single application, addressing specific Market Requirements with product-specific differentiators.
As an example of overlap between the brand messaging and the customer use case, consider that extensibility is one of the Market Requirements of the solution. "How GitLab delivers" that includes a couple aspects of what "Open" means:
Dozens of project integrations, Webhooks, and an open core model in which everyone can contribute directly to the GitLab project.
As an example of the distinction between the two, consider our public roadmap and handbook.
While the two motions serve different audiences and purposes, they do share a large amount of common messaging, as the Visibility, Collaboration, and Velocity pillars of the Open DevOps Platform (and the resulting outcomes of Iteration and Innovation) are also important to the DevOps Platform solution.
There are two primary user personas:
Devon - the DevOps Engineer Devon assists multiple different teams with varied needs. A single DevOps platform provides a consistent and efficient development experience, eliminating the burden of supporting unique, team-specific implementations.
Delaney - the Development Team Lead Delaney is responsible for communication and collaboration throughout the entire product lifecycle, and requires end-to-end visibility into work items and status to accurately estimate capacity, plan features, and coordinate with all parties. A single DevOps platform provides those services natively, allowing Delaney to access necessary information as needed, without dependencies.
End-to-end DevOps requirements typically involve executive involvement - VP of DevOps, VP of Engineering, VP of Innovation and above.
The two primary buyer personas are:
The DevOps Platform is relevant to all market segments and industries, though different aspects of the DevOps Platform will resonate with each group. The Message House provides detailed information on segment messaging and positioning.
| Market Requirement | Description | Typical capability-enabling features | Value/ROI |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Agile Planning | The solution supports the planning, initiating, monitoring, controlling, closing, and measuring the value created by Agile teams and projects. | Requirements, Epics, Features, Stories, Iterations, Backlogs, Roadmaps, Boards | Allows businesses to budget for, prioritize, deliver, and assess the success of innovation initiatives. |
| 2. Source Code Management (Version Control & Collaboration) | Control and manage different versions of the application assets from code to configuration and from design to deployment. | Single sign-on, code ownership, change reviews and approvals, IP allowlist/denylist, activity stream, signed commits, branching and protected branches, diffing, merging, object storage, committer access rules, WebIDE, Geo and Geo HA, disaster recovery, project and file templates, design management, workflow automation, wiki, snippets, and see full list | Share and reuse code, prevent rework, and make reviews more efficient. Streamline reviews and collaboration around code changes. Ease compliance with approvals of code changes. |
| 3. Continuous Integration | Automate and streamline build and test to improve quality and velocity. | Build automation, test automation, pipeline configuration management, visibility & collaboration, multi-platform and language support, pipeline security, and more (see full list) | CI makes software development easier, faster and less risky for development teams. |
| 4. Security | Shift security left and make it relevant throughout the delivery lifecycle. | AST, DAST, IAST, license compliance, fuzz testing, load testing, real-time reporting | Test early to eliminate vulnerabilities at the source and reduce time and cost of remediation. |
| 5. Continuous Delivery | Streamline and automate delivering and deploying code to different environments. | Progressive Delivery, Roll out scenarios, Feature Flags, Review Apps, Post Deployment Monitoring | Consistent and repeatable release processes, faster time to market and lower risk releases |
| 6. Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance | Define, enforce and report on compliance policies and frameworks | Requirements Management, Policy Management, Audit Management | Reduce risk exposure, educate developers about compliance in real-time, provide evidence of compliance to third parties. |
| 7. Incident Management | Organize multiple inputs into actionable workflows to allow the appropriate people to remedy anomalous conditions. | Manage on-call schedules, receive notifications for triggered alerts. Triage alerts and incidents. Inform stakeholders of status. | Increase customer satisfaction and application uptime by ensuring the simplest path to resolution. |
| 8. Extensibility | Extend the system to work with business applications, external data sources, and legacy point solutions. | Webhooks, APIs | Customize DevOps platform to any workflow or business need, adopt end-to-end DevOps incrementally |
| Market Requirements | How GitLab Delivers | GitLab Stage/Category | Demos |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Agile Management | Project, program, and portfolio management within a single system, enhanced by complete visibility into the work being done and the efficiency of value delivery. | Plan stage: Epics, Iterations, Milestones, Requirements Management Manage stage: Value Stream Analytics, Insights |
 Planning and Insights Value Stream Management: Executive, Developer, Security, Operations, Productivity Issues, Epics, Milestones, Roadmaps Burndown Charts Labels and Boards |
| 2. Source Code Management (Version Control & Collaboration) | Role-based access control for many IP asset types, including code, Jupyter notebooks, and graphics. Traceable collaboration in merge requests and discussions, reviews and approvals. Support for large, distributed teams with Geo and Gitaly Clusters. See full list. | Manage stage: Subgroups, Code Review Analytics Plan stage: Issue Tracking Create stage: SCM including Gitaly, Code Review, Design Management, Wiki, Git LFS, WebIDE, Live Preview, Snippets Verify stage: Code Quality Release stage: Release evidence Enablement stage: Geo, Disaster Recovery, Reference Architectures |
Manage, Track, and Maintain Access Authentication Many Asset Types Foster Collaboration Project Templates Control Changes to Dev Assets Distributed SCM |
| 3. Continuous Integration | Architect CI pipelines with .gitlab-ci.yml files, structure CI processes, run automated tests, security scans, and build your app using GitLab Runner as the execution agent. See code quality analysis and code coverage details from source code. Get feedback on code changes directly in GitLab. Manage packages, repositories, and containers along with their dependencies in GitLab. See full list. | Verify stage Package stage Release stage Secure stage |
SCM, Code Review, and CI in One App Build Automation Pipeline Configuration Management AutoDevOps: Easy to Get Started Continuous Testing |
| 4. Security | Secure code capabilities built into CI/CD workflows empower developers to identify vulnerabilities and remove them early in the development cycles. Scans work out of the box and are easy for developers to integrate into workflows, ensuring broad coverage. A bill of materials shows dependencies for preventative guardrails. | Secure stage: SAST, DAST, Secret Detection, Fuzz Testing, Dependency Scanning, Container Scanning, License Compliance, Vulnerability Management | Secure Development Adding Security to Your CI/CD Pipeline SAST and Secrets Mobile SAST DAST Fuzz Testing Dependency Scanning Container Scanning License Compliance Vulnerability Management |
| 5. Continuous Delivery | Unified, automated deployment and monitoring strategies with modern compliance within a single application. | Release stage: Continuous Delivery, Review Apps, Advanced Deployments, Feature Flags, Release Evidence, Secrets Management Monitor stage: Metrics, Logging, Tracing, Error Tracking Verify stage:: Browser Performance Testing |
CD Overview Application Release Automation & Delivery Feature Flags Integrated CD and Monitoring |
| 6. Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance | Compliance tools baked into the system and automatically applied throughout the lifecycle, from requirements creation to code commits, with a single repository of all changes, collaboration, and accountability. | Manage stage: Compliance Management Plan stage: Requirements Management |
Compliance Management Requirements Management |
| 7. Incident Management | Single source of truth for incident creation, aggregation, and management. | Monitor Stage: Incident Management, Runbooks | Incident Management Executable Runbooks |
| 8. Extensibility | Dozens of project integrations, Webhooks, and an open core model in which everyone can contribute directly to the GitLab project. | Create stage: Integrations | Basic Jira Integration More with Jira: 1, 2, 3 Azure DevOps SCM and GitLab CI/CD GitHub SCM and GitLab CI/CD GitLab App Sec with Jenkins Dependency Scanning with GitLab and WhiteSource |
| Differentiator | Value | Proof Point |
|---|---|---|
| A Single Application for the Entire DevOps Lifecycle | A single application eliminates complex integrations, data chokepoints, and toolchain maintenance, resulting in greater productivity. | - |
| End-to-End Visibility | GitLab's common data model enables enables end-to-end visibility and traceability throughout the DevOps lifecycle, correlating and aggregating data automatically. | Deliver More Value and Fewer Headaches with an End-to-End DevOps Platform |
| Your software, deployed your way | GitLab is infrastructure agnostic (supporting GCP, AWS, Azure, OpenShift, VMware, On Prem, Bare Metal, and more), offering a consistent workflow experience - irrespective of the environment. | Install GitLab: Supported Platforms |
The message house provides a structure to describe and discuss value and differentiators for the use case.
The suggested discovery questions below are meant to help you uncover opportunities when speaking with prospects or customers who are not currently using GitLab or are only using GitLab as a point solution, and not experiencing the full value of an end-to-end platform.
Don’t try to use them all—just those most relevant to your customer that will help you identify the value they need to see. Please contribute additional questions!
Amongst the many competitors in the DevOps space, Azure DevOps provides the most comprehensive end-to-end DevOps capabilities, with GitHub continuing to build toward a similar vision.
For a list of analysts with a current understanding of GitLab's capabilities for this use case, please reach out to Analyst Relations via Slack (#analyst-relations) or by submitting an issue and selecting the "AR-Analyst-Validation" template.
One tool for SCM+CI/CD was a big initial win. Now wrapping security scans into that tool as well has already increased our visibility into security vulnerabilities. The integrated Docker registry has also been very helpful for us. Issue/Product management features let everyone operate in the same space regardless of role.
Adam Dehnel, Product Architect, BI Worldwide
Development can move much faster when engineers can stay on one page and click buttons to release auditable changes to production and have easy rollbacks; everything is much more streamlined. Within one sprint, just 2 weeks, Glympse was able to implement security jobs across all of their repositories using GitLab’s CI templates and their pre-existing Docker-based deployment scripts.
Zaq Wiedmann, Lead Software Engineer, Glympse
GitLab has allowed us to dramatically increase the velocity of development in our Engineering Division. We believe GitLab’s dedication to helping enterprises rapidly and effectively bring software to market will help other companies achieve the same sort of efficiencies we have seen inside Goldman Sachs. We now see some teams running and merging 1000+ CI feature branch builds a day!
Andrew Knight, Managing Director, Goldman Sachs
Link to SFDC list of use case specific references
Generally, the more of the GitLab application in use, the greater the value of the platform story, because there are more people in more roles contributing and accessing more data in one place. In addition to the benefits listed on the Why Premium page, there are a number of standout benefits in Premium vs. Free.
Ultimate supports the broadest possible range of personas, extending to Portfolio Managers with multi-level epics, and first-class support for Security and Compliance personas with role-specific dashboards and a host of other features. Ultimate offers free Guest User accounts, which can invite other stakeholders to participate in discussions at no cost.
Inventory of key pages in the buyer's Journey
| Awareness learning about the problem |
Consideration looking for solution ideas |
Decision is this the right solution |
|---|---|---|
| DevOps platform topic page | DevOps platform solution page | proof points |
