Topics Single application

Why a single application for DevOps?


Learn how simplifying your toolchain using a single application can increase your speed while reducing cost and risk.

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The DevOps toolchain tax

Traditional DevOps solutions require cobbling together multiple tools that were never designed to work together in order to build an DevOps toolchain.

devops-toolchain-complexity

This leads to having to pay a “tax” on your toolchain made up hidden costs.

  • Time and cost to acquire point tools

  • Time and cost to integrate all of these tools

  • Time and cost to train users on many tools

  • User context switching between all of these tools

  • Time and cost to administer all of these tools

Single application architecture

GitLab is a complete DevOps platform designed from the ground up as a single application. From project planning and source code management, to CI/CD, security, and monitoring GitLab’s capabilities are built-in as part of the app so you don’t have to integrate multiple tools.

Benefits of a single application

Reduce risk with a single set of permissions

Rather than having to manage authentication and authorization across many tools. GitLab has a single login and one place to set permissions so everyone has the correct access.

Reduce costs with less administrative overhead

With a single application to install, configure, and maintain there’s less administrative overhead. Since fewer staff needed to administer a single application verse a complex toolchain more of your engineering resources can be allocated towards development of features for your users.

Increase speed with a lower time to resolution

When a build pipeline fails how do you troubleshoot? Is it a problem with the infrastructure or did new code fail a test? Perhaps there is state in the original specification that needed to help debug. With traditional toolchains the issue tracker, code repository, and CI/CD pipeline are all separate tools. When teams need to troubleshoot they have to pass state back and forth in a ticket because they likely don’t all have access to the same applications.

With GitLab, everyone who needs to help troubleshoot a failure has access to all of the data. Pipeline, code, comments, issues, and test results all appear on the merge request so there’s a single view. With everyone on the same page troubleshooting is much simpler and things get up and running faster.

See more benefits of a single application

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