Looking for a customer-facing overview of GitLab’s Continuous Integration (CI) capabilities? See the CI Solution
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 DevSecOps.
Who to contact
Product Marketing
Developer Advocate
Daniel Hom (@danielhom)
Itzik Gan-Baruch ( @iganbaruch )
The Market Viewpoint
Continuous Integration
The Continuous Integration (CI) use case is a staple of modern software development in the digital age. It’s unlikely that you hear the word “DevOps” without a reference to “Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery” (CI/CD) soon after. In the most basic sense, the CI part of the equation enables development teams to automate building and testing their code.
When practicing CI, teams collaborate on projects by using a shared repository to store, modify and track frequent changes to their codebase. Developers check in, or integrate, their code into the repository multiple times a day and rely on automated tests to run in the background. These automated tests verify the changes by checking for potential bugs and security vulnerabilities, as well as performance and code quality degradations. Running tests as early in the software development lifecycle as possible is advantageous in order to detect problems before they intensify.
CI makes software development easier, faster, and less risky for developers. By automating builds and tests, developers can make smaller changes and commit them with confidence. They get earlier feedback on their code in order to iterate and improve it quickly increasing the overall pace of innovation. Studies done by DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) have shown that robust DevOps practices lead to improved business outcomes. All of these “DORA 4” metrics can be improved by using CI:
Lead time: Early feedback and build/test automation help decrease the time it takes to go from code committed to code successfully running in production.
Deployment frequency: Automated build and test is a pre-requisite to automated deploy.
Time to restore service: Automated pipelines enable fixes to be deployed to production faster reducing Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR)
Change failure rate: Early automated testing greatly reduced the number of defects that make their way out to production.
GitLab CI/CD comes built-in to GitLab’s complete DevOps platform delivered as a single application. There’s no need to cobble together multiple tools and users get a seamless experience out-of-the-box.
Personas
User Persona
The typical user personas for this usecase are the Developer, Development team lead, and DevOps engineer.
Software Developer Sacha
Software developers have expertise in all sorts of development tools and programming languages, making them an extremely valuable resource in the DevOps space. They take advantage of source code management and CI capabilities together to work fast and consistently deliver high quality code.
Developers are problem solvers, critical thinkers, and love to learn. They work best on planned tasks and want to spend a majority of their time writing code that ends up being delivered to customers in the form of lovable features.
Development Team Lead Delaney
Development team leads care about their team’s productivity and ability to deliver planned work on time. Leveraging CI helps maximize their team’s productivity and minimize disruptions to planned tasks.
Team Leads need to understand their team’s capacity to assign upcoming tasks, as well as help resolve any blockers by assigning to right resources to assist.
DevOps Engineer Devon
DevOps Engineers have a deep understanding of their organization’s SDLC and provide support for infrastructure, environments, and integrations. CI makes their life easier by providing a single place to run automated tests and verify code changes integrated back into the SCM by development teams.
DevOps Engineers directly support the development teams and prefer to work proactively instead of reactively. They split their time between coding to implement features and bug fixes, and helping developers build, test, and release code.
Buyer Personas
CI purchasing typically does not require executive involvement. It is usually acquired and installed via our freemium offering without procurement or IT’s approval. This process is commonly known as shadow IT. When the upgrade is required, the Application Development Manager is the most frequent decision-maker. The influence of the Application Development Director is notable too.
Industry Analyst Resources
Examples of comparative research for this use case are listed just below. Additional research relevant to this use case can be found in the Analyst Reports - Use Cases spreadsheet.
Streamlines application development workflow by connecting simple, repeatable, automated tasks into a series of interdependent automatic builds. This includes compiling, linking, packaging, and ensuring that the binary libraries/files output are ready for testing. Ensure software is consistently built without manual intervention, allowing developers to incorporate automated tests into their pipelines and start verifying/validating code changes. Teams have control over where automated jobs run either in the cloud (public/private/hybrid) or using shared infrastructure.
CI/CD pipelines, scalable resources, job orchestration/work distribution, caching, external repository integrations. Automated builds support a wide variety of languages, frameworks, and libraries development teams rely on.
Increase build speeds. Development teams work more efficiently by reducing otherwise manual work.
2) Test automation
Run and manage automated tests and validate changes before they’re merged to production. This includes everything from basic to more in-depth tests and extends test automation into areas of functional, system, performance testing, and more. Ensure software is consistently tested to meet both technical and business requirements without manual intervention, enabling developers to get rapid feedback if their code changes introduce potential defects or vulnerabilities.
Ability to run isolated, automated, tests in CI/CD pipelines. Various tests may include but aren’t limited to unit testing, code integration testing, regression testing, static code analysis, functional testing, and accessibility testing.
Catch potential errors sooner rather than later before they intensify.
3) Pipeline configuration management
The CI solution makes it easy for developers to automate the build and test workflow, specifically connecting to their source code repository, defining specific actions/tasks in build pipelines, and set parameters for exactly how/when to run jobs, using scripts and/or a GUI to configure pipeline changes. Configurations are easily reproducible and traceability exists to allow for quick comparisons and tracking of changes to environments.
Configurations via web UI or supports config-as-code in a human readable syntax, like YAML.
Maximize development time and improves productivity. Less manual work.
4) Visibility and collaboration
The solution enables development teams to have visibility into pipeline structure, specific job execution, and manage changes and updates to the pipeline jobs. The solution should enable teams to easily collaborate and make code changes, review work, and communicate directly. CI solutions should provide visibility and insights into the state of any build.
Faster feedback and less risk that changes cause builds to break.
5) Platform and language support
Many organizations use a mix of operating systems and code stacks within their development teams. The CI solution must operate on multiple operating systems (Windows, Linux, and Mac). The CI solution must also be language-agnostic supporting automation of build and test for a wide variety of development languages(Java, PHP, Ruby, C, etc.).
Option to use native packages, installers, downloads from source, and containers. Cloud-native platform support for public, private, or hybrid hosting. Runs on any OS.
Gives teams more flexibility, making it easier to adopt.
6) Pipeline security
Building security into an automated process ensures access to CI pipelines is consistently managed and controlled. Facilitate secure access to jobs/branches for the right users, safely store/manage sensitive data (such as secrets), and enforce governance and compliance policies without slowing anyone down.
Access control (like RBAC), enterprise-based access systems (like LDAP), data encryption, secrets management, and secure network connections.
Reduces business risk and protects intellectual property. Instills confidence in end-users.
7) Built in compliance
The solution has capabilities and policies built in to ensure that code being delivered is compliant and secure in the event of an audit. Be able to track and manage important events, trace them back to who performed specific actions, as well as when they occurred.
Automated security and compliance testing baked into CI pipelines. Automatic notifications for compliance issues. Audit controls and policies in place.
Reduce risk and discover flaws or potential violations earlier in the development process.
8) Easy to get started
The steps required to successfully setup CI should be simple and straightforward with minimal barrier to entry. The time and effort required for teams to get started from initial installation, configuration, onboarding users, and delivering value should be short (days, not weeks).
Supports both on-premise and SaaS implementations. Has robust documentation outlining steps to connect to a repository and get a CI server up and running quickly. Supports configuration-as-code or provides a GUI for initial configurations. Web interface to provision users.
Faster time to value.
9) DevOps tools and integrations
The solution supports strong integrations to both upstream and downstream processes such as project management, source code management and version control, artifact repositories, security scanning, compliance management, continuous delivery, etc. A CI solution with strong DevOps integrations means there’s flexibility for users who need or want a balance between native capabilities and integrations.
Integrations with build automation tools (Gradle, Maven etc.), code analysis tools, binary repos, CD tools, IDEs, APIs, third party libraries or extensibility via plugins.
Increases efficiency. Lessens cost and the extra work that comes along with potential migrations.
10) Analytics
Capture and report on pipeline performance metrics and data throughout the build/test processes in order to identify bottlenecks, constraints, and other opportunities for improvement. Identify failing tests, code quality issues, and valuable trends in data indicative of overall application quality.
Build health, pipeline visualization, code coverage, logging, and performance metrics such as deployment frequency.
Increase efficiencies and reduce unnecessary costs.
11) Elastic scalability
The solution supports elastic scaling leveraging well understood, third-party, mechanisms whenever possible. Supports build scalability around existing native per-cloud and per-virtual environment vendor capabilities since they represent already debugged code for a complex problem, and the customers architects/operators are much more likely to be familiar with these mechanisms in their chosen infrastructure/cloud provider.
Supports ephemeral provisioning. Utilizes strong Kubernetes integration at-scale or supports non-Kubernetes scaling options. For example, use AWS Autoscaling Groups in AWS, GCP scaling in GCP, and Azure Autoscale in Azure.
Faster and more efficient. Reduce infrastructure overhead with on-demand resources. Provides flexibility to scale large workloads using popular cloud providers.
12) Artifact and dependency management
The solution allows for easy management of outputs and binaries from the build/test process. Manage repos, application packages, and containers with visibility into their dependencies.
View and download artifacts. Modify, store, and share images. Support for a wide range of common package formats and third-party integrations. Can be used on-prem or in the cloud.
Streamlines your CI/CD workflow and speeds up development.
Run various automated tests in your CI pipelines to verify/validate code pre-production. Includes Unit tests, integration testing, browser performance testing, code quality, code coverage, usability testing, and accessibility testing.
See code quality analysis and code coverage details from source code. Get feedback on code changes directly in GitLab with merge requests (MRs) and issues: edit, comment, review, and share in one place. Preview changes in review apps, see commit history, and get automatic alerts on important events.
GitLab is multi-platform (Unix, Windows, OSX, and any other platform that supports Go) and multi-language (Java, PHP, Ruby, C, and any other language).
Security automation and scanning capabilities are built into GitLab’s CI pipelines (SAST, DAST, dependency scanning, container scanning). Use Security scanning capabilities with Auto DevOps as well.
Slack, Jira, Docker, Kubernetes, external repos like GitHub, Bitbucket, and any other Git-based repo. GitLab also supports various APIs and third-party libraries for connecting external services and build tools, as well as GDK and Frontend Foundations for community contributors.
Manage and optimize your software delivery lifecycle with metrics and value stream insight in order to streamline and increase your delivery velocity. Visualize pipelines and report on performance metrics such as memory usage, load testing results, code complexity, and code coverage stastics.
Multi-platform: you can execute builds on Unix, Windows, OSX, and any other platform that supports Go.
Multi-language: build scripts are command line driven and work with Java, PHP, Ruby, C, and any other language.
Parallel builds: GitLab splits builds over multiple machines for fast execution.
Autoscaling: you can automatically spin up and down VM’s or Kubernetes pods to make sure your builds get processed immediately while minimizing costs.
Realtime logging: a link in the merge request takes you to the current build log that updates dynamically.
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.
Build artifacts: upload binaries and other build artifacts to GitLab. Easily browse and download them.
Test locally: reproduce tests locally using gitlab-runner exec.
Docker support: use custom Docker images, spin up services as part of testing, build new Docker images, run on Kubernetes.
Container Registry: built-in container registry to store, share, and use container images.
we’ll add to this list as we continue to build out more lovable features!
Top 3 GitLab Differentiators
Differentiator
Value
Proof Point
Demos
1) Leading SCM, Code Review, and CI in one application
You’ll be able to streamline code reviews and increase collaboration at proven enterprise scale with GitLab, making development workflows easier to manage and minimizing context switching required between tools in complex DevOps toolchains. Release software faster and outpace the competition with the ability to quickly respond to changes in the market.
Your organization’s speed to market is directly impacted by how fast your development teams can move and adapt to change at an individual level. GitLab provides a complete DevOps platform that teams can use to innovate faster without sacrificing quality and enables cross-team collaboration in a central location. Combining powerful features “that just work” and leveraging automation in place of manual work wherever possible helps bring teams together across the entire SDLC regardless of role - product managers, designers, developers, managers, and all roles in between, can work more efficiently and stay involved as a part of a single conversation across the SDLC.
GitLab deploys over 160 times a day and is one of the 30 Highest Velocity Open Source Projects from the CNCF, we’re voted as a G2 Crowd Leader 2018 with more than 170 public reviews and a 4.4 rating noting “Powerful team collaboration for managing software development projects,” and have over 2,900 active contributors. Forrester’s Total Economic Impact (TEI) of GitLab study details the cost savings and business benefits of adopting GitLab.
3) Shift built in security and compliance “all the way left”
You get security features out-of-the-box and automated security testing with audit controls to facilitate policy compliance. Moving security testing farther left into the SDLC catches potential problems earlier and shortens feedback loops for developers. This means a faster time to market delivering secure, compliant, code and an increase in customer confidence.
The message house provides a structure to describe and discuss the value and differentiators for Continuous Integration with GitLab.
GitLab Runner Messaging and Positioning
The runner message house provides a structure to describe and discuss the value and differentiators for GitLab Runner, the open source project that is used to run your jobs and send the results back to GitLab.
Customer Facing Slides
Discovery Questions
The sample discovery questions below are meant to provide a baseline and help you uncover opportunities when speaking with prospects or customers who are not currently using GitLab for CI. See a more complete list of questions, provide feedback, or comment with suggestions for GitLab’s CI discovery questions and feel free to contribute!
Sample Discovery Questions
CI/CD tool sprawl is one of the most common problems we see. How do you manage the complexities of many different teams using various tools and still meet their needs?
We’ve heard that some customers struggle with managing complex pipelines and supporting integrations. What difficulties do you and/or your team see in these areas? Do you have a sense of how much time the team is spending?
Many of our customers have multiple Jenkins administrators. Is this the case with you? What would it mean to your organization if you could free half of those people up to do more than manage pipelines?
How happy are your teams with the usability and interface of their current CI solution?
Has there been any discussion to standardize on a single solution for CI since you’re already using GitLab for other needs?
How are you currently supporting CI internally? Do you have a dedicated team or require in-house expertise for guidance, best practices, and fixing issues?
How often is your day to day or planned work interrupted to fix or maintain your CI tool?
How much productivity is lost because of delays due to managing your Jenkins environment separately from your source code?
How much time does your team spend ‘babysitting’ their pipeline jobs?
Is your organization investing to improve CI/CD in the short term or long term? Is there a clearly defined strategy or timeline?
What’s the expectation on your team to support or facilitate this initiative?
Are you going to be onboarding additional teams in the next say, 12 months?
What kind of roadblocks or hurdles does your team encounter when automating builds/tests at scale? How is this affecting your velocity as you scale?
What is the workflow if a developer wants to create a new pipeline or add a job to an existing pipeline? How much time does that take the developer away from doing “real work?”
What would be the impact if your team were able to self-service a working pipeline within 1 hour with confidence that all standards and best practices are followed?
Would you be open to scheduling a follow-up call to discuss more about what GitLab CI can do for you and your team?
Additional Discovery Questions
Has there been any discussion to standardize on a single solution for CI since you’re already using GitLab for other needs?
What is your strategy around improving CI/CD?
Would it be valuable to have your CD solution use the same configuration and format as your CI, AND have visibility into the full product pipeline from idea to production?
Tell me about the difficulties you’re having managing complex pipelines and supporting integrations.
For details specific to each use case, and in respect of our contractual confidentiality agreements with Industry Analyst firms, our engagement plans are available to GitLab team members in the following protected document: IAR Use Case Profile and Engagement Plan.
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.
Competitive Comparison
Amongst the many competitors in the DevOps space, Jenkins and CircleCI are the closest competitors offering continuous integration capabilities.
Proof Points - Customer Recognitions
Quotes and reviews
Gartner Peer Insights
Gartner Peer Insights reviews constitute the subjective opinions of individual end users based on their own experiences, and do not represent the views of Gartner or its affiliates. Obvious typos have been amended.
“We’ve migrated all our products from several “retired” VCS’s to GitLab in only 6 months. - Including CI/CD process adoption - Without [loss] of code - Without frustrated developers - Without enormous costs”
“Finally, the most amazing thing about GitLab is how well integrated the [GitLab] ecosystem is. It covers almost every step of development nicely, from the VCS, to CI, and deployment.”
“One of the best ways to approach source code management (Git) and release pipeline management [CI/CD]. [GitLab] gives you a simple yet highly customizable approach to release management which is a complicated topic.”
“The best software tool to manage all our projects and configure [CI/CD]. I will definitely recommend GitLab to everyone that wants to start a new project and doesn’t want to use too many tools, GitLab has everything that you need to manage.”
“Over the years, we have successfully taken advantage of [GitLab’s] continuous deployment and integration mechanisms to build [and] maintain a robust and solid codebase.”
“Overall, the experience with GitLab is very positive, it provides many powerful features especially regarding Continuous Integration and [Continuous Deployment]”
“GitLab isn’t just for hosting your code, it’s for the entire lifecycle of your code. Since they host code, it makes sense for them to provide services around development and getting code into production. Their integration into other services is really easy. They give you GitLab-CI for any CI/CD needs, driven from a yaml file.”
“This is really an amazing source code repository toolset which enables the robust CI practices which are inbuilt features of GitLab. This can be utilized well in any enterprise looking for the smooth CI/CD pipelines.”
Problem: JLR had 6 week feedback loops resulting in slowdowns
Solution: Premium (CI)
Result:Feedback loops reduced to 30 mins. JLR is deploying within the engineering environment, 50-70 times per day of each individual piece of software to a target or to a vehicle.
Problem Needed to increase developer efficiency and software quality
Solution: GitLab Premium (CI/CD, SCM)
Result: Improved from 1 build every two weeks to over a 1000/day, or releasing 6 times per day per developer, and an average cycle time from branch to merge is now 30 minutes; simplified workflow and simplified administration
All the new strategic pieces of ‘software development platforms are tied into GitLab. GitLab is used as a complete ecosystem for development, source code control and reviews, builds, testing, QA, and production deployments.
Request reference calls by pressing the “Find Reference Accounts” button at the top of your stage 3 or later opportunity.
Adoption Guide
The following section provides resources to help CSMs lead capabilities adoption, but can also be used for prospects or customers interested in adopting GitLab stages and categories.
Playbook Steps
Ask Discovery Questions to identify customer need
Complete the deeper dive discovery sharing demo, proof points, value positioning, etc.
Agree to adoption roadmap, timeline and change management plans, offering relevant services (as needed) and updating the success plan (as appropriate)
Lead the adoption plan with the customer, enabling teams and tracking progress through engagement and/or product analytics data showing use case adoption
Adoption Recommendation
This table shows the recommended features to adopt, links to product documentation, the respective subscription tier for the feature, and Service Ping metrics.
Why choose GitLab Premium for CI?
As you scale CI throughout your organization and onboard additional teams, GitLab Premium unlocks a faster path to value for any number of teams with expert support, advanced configurations, and consistent standards.
Gain peace of mind: take advantage of enterprise level priority support, including 24/7 uptime support, a named Customer Success Manager (CSM), and upgrade assistance.
CI/CD for external repositories- connect your external repositories instead of moving your entire existing project(s) to get the benefits of GitLab CI/CD. This feature supports GitHub, Bitbucket Cloud, and any other Git-based repository.
Ultimate
Why choose GitLab Ultimate for CI?
Achieve advanced DevOps maturity with executive visibility, deeper insights/analytics around usage, and additional capabilities to keep your environments secure and compliant across the board.
Enterprise-grade priority support, including 24/7 uptime support, a named Customer Success Manager (CSM), and upgrade assistance are all still included with Gold/Ultimate.
Embed security and compliance into your CI Pipelines.
Protect your IP and get access to free guest users.
License Compliance- identify the presence of new software licenses included in your project and track project dependencies. Approve or deny the inclusion of a specific license.
Compliance Dashboard- gives you the ability to see your group’s Merge Request activity by providing a high-level view for all projects in the group and approvers for a given Merge Request.
Resources
What is CI/CD?
Check out this introductory video to learn the basics of CI/CD as software development best practices and how they apply with GitLab CI/CD!
As a refresher, Continuous Integration empowers developers to regularly integrate code changes in small batches so they can be automatically built and tested before being merged into production. It may sound obvious to take that approach but most modern application development involves a variety of programming languages and tools that run on different platforms that makes integrations more complex.
Thinking more broadly in terms of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (referencing CI/CD together as one has become more common today), CI ensures software is automatically validated pre-deployment and ready for the next step in the application delivery process. CD acts as an extension of CI to automate the actual release process and gets software in a state where “it can be deployed to production at any time with the touch of a button,” to reference Jez Humble’s take on CD.
Build and test automation