What does GitLab do?

The TL;DR

GitLab is a somewhat contrarian take on DevOps: it’s basically one giant tool for literally anything you’d want to do relating to building and deploying software.

• DevOps spans the gamut in software, from source control to performance monitoring

• Traditionally, teams have used different tools for each part of the DevOps pipeline

• GitLab brings the entire process together with a single platform for DevOps

• Product lines include source control, issue tracking, CI/CD, and monitoring

GitLab is a very non-traditional company – beyond their unusual approach to the market, they operate completely remotely, publicly publish their internal guidelines, and are open source. They also IPOd recently, and are now worth $15B – so it’s an organization worth understanding.

Refresher: what’s DevOps?

Understanding GitLab means understanding DevOps, which is thankfully the subject of this recent Technically post. Here’s a quick refresher if you can’t be bothered to click.

Much of the tedious process of building software is actually what happens after you write working code: testing that code to make sure it’s going to work for your users, and then actually getting it out there into the wild, and monitoring it to make sure it’s performing well. These three pieces are often categorized as: