Core DevOps Solutions
Core DevOps Solution Definition
A DevOps solution is:
- A customer problem or initiative that needs a solution and attracts budget
- Defined in customer terms
- Often aligned to industry analyst market coverage (i.e. Gartner, Forrester, etc. write reports on the topic)
- Relatively stable over time.
- Aligned to value plays and revenue programs
These are discrete problems that we believe GitLab solves and are reasons customers choose GitLab (hence which we should seek out in prospects). More information on how GitLab uses solutions can be found on the Solutions Go-to-market page
Core DevOps Solutions go-to-market motions
1. DevOps Platform
Business objectives: We want to achieve expected results of DevOps by resolving siloed teams, lack of visibility and collaboration which inhibits my speed of delivery. - (DevOps Platform) I want to manage my entire DevOps lifecycle more efficiently with better outcomes. The number of tools and maintenance of integrations is overwhelming and costly and security is challenging to integrate. My processes may include planning to production or may be a segment of the SDLC. (GitLab examples: Epics, Issue Boards, Source Code Management, CI, CD, Security Scans and Monitoring from GitLab. Value Stream Management: (VSM) helps you visualize and manage the flow of new innovation from ideas to customers. In GitLab, cycle analytics is a key element of managing the value stream.)
Analyst Coverage: Value Stream Delivery Platform report
Value Drivers:
- Increase Operational Efficiencies: consistent and efficient dev experience with single source of truth and simplified tool chain
- Deliver Better Products Faster: More collaboration, working in parallel
- Reduce Security and Compliance Risk: standardized pipelines for consistent testing, end-to-end common controls, and shared views for visibility across functions.
2. Software Delivery Automation
Business objectives: We want to increase the quality of my code while decreasing time to delivery. We need to automate the build and testing processes to consistently integrate code and continuously test. We want to run the unit and integration tests, measure performance and automate manual QA processes. We may use GitLab SCM or another. (Example capabilities in GitLab include Pipeline, CI Runner, Jobs, Scheduled Jobs, Testing, Security Scanning (SAST), and Code Quality). We also want to speed up the build and release process and empower our developers to automatically deploy code. This requires that we automate the build, test and packaging, configuration and deployment of applications to a target environment. (Example capabilities in GitLab include: Container Registry, Deploy Boards, Canary Deploys, Partial Deploys, Manual Deploys, Environments.)
Analyst Coverage: Forrester CI and Forrester Cloud CI, Gartner ARO, Forrester CDRA
Value Drivers:
- Increase Operational Efficiencies: Single source of truth between SCM and CI; consistent and efficient dev experience. Scalable, self-service, reusable deployment template. Deploy anywhere.
- Deliver Better Products Faster: Automatically deploy and test application with early feedback.
- Reduce Security and Compliance Risk: Enforce common controls and scan for vulnerabilities at the point of code change.
3. Continuous Software Security Assurance
Continuous Software Security Assurance
Aligns to what was DevSecOps (aka Shift Left Security)
Business objectives: We want to test for application security vulnerabilities early in our app dev lifecycle. We need to identify vulnerabilities during development with actionable information to empower developers to remediate vulnerabilities earlier in the life cycle. (In GitLab, SAST, DAST, Dependency Scanning, and Container Scanning, etc.)
Analyst Coverage: Forrester SCA Wave, Gartner Application Security MQ
Value Drivers:
- Increase Operational Efficiencies: Fix vulnerabilities at point of code change to reduce rework
- Deliver Better Products Faster: Ability to start testing early in dev process to eliminate vulnerabilities at the source
- Reduce Security and Compliance Risk: Fix vulnerabilities with actionable feedback to the developer at point of code change. Auto remediate when possible.
4. Continuous Software Compliance
4. Continuous Software Compliance
Business objectives: We want to reduce risk by ensuring pipelines are compliant with common controls and popular industry regulations. We need to enforce standardized CI pipelines that include requisite testing and then ensure common compliance controls are followed (such as separation of duties).
Analyst coverage: none yet
Value Drivers:
- Reduce security and compliance risk: standardization and policy enforcement
- Increase operational efficiences: simplified audits
- Deliver better products faster: find compliance flaws earlier in the SDLC to avoid impacting time to market
Wedge conversation topics
These are topics where sales and marketing conversations may start, but then we want to lead the prospect toward delivery automation. For instance, GitOps is hot topic and ranking well in SEO so it’s worth talking about. But ultimately we want to drive people to delivery automation (or platform).
1. GitOps
We are looking for a way to automatically provision, administer and maintain infrastructure as code. - (CI/CD Infrastructure-as-code or GitOps) I manually stage and test environments for infrastructure making it hard to track and error-prone. I want to stage all components and test them to be sure it works to automate my release pipelines, provide consistency, reduce cost, and eliminate errors. I may frequently leverage integration with Terraform, Kubernetes, Ansible, OpenStack and others.
Analyst Coverage: TBD
Value Drivers:
- Increase Operational Efficiencies: consistent dev experience, reusable scripts for operations
- Deliver Better Products Faster: developer self-service, reusable CI/CD templates
- Reduce Security and Compliance Risk: enforces common controls
This conversation should lead the prospect toward the Delivery Automation solution.
2. Source Code Management (aka Version Control and Collaboration, VC&C)
2. Source Code Management (aka Version Control and Collaboration, VC&C)
We are looking for a way to create, manage and protect our intellectual property (i.e. source code, design, images, etc). - In simple terms Version Control and Collaboration (VC&C), but more inclusively, product configuration management or product asset management. We need a better way to manage changes to documents, software, images, large websites, and other collections of code, configuration, and metadata among disparate teams. (Examples in GitLab include Git, branches, merge requests, code review, InnerSourcing, WebIDE, and files.)
Analyst Coverage: IDC, to some extent, forecasts this market. No spot on, recent reports, though Gartner may be considering a future report.
Value Drivers:
- Increase Operational Efficiencies: share and reuse code, prevent rework, and make reviews more efficient
- Deliver Better Products Faster: streamline reviews and collaboration around code changes
- Reduce Security and Compliance Risk: easier compliance through approvals of code changes
Note: SCM is sold via the web. There is no accompanying Value Play. This conversation should lead the prospect toward the Delivery Automation solution.
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