GitLab Outlines Scope of DevOps Ambitions

At the GitLab Commit event in New York today, GitLab launched an ambitious effort to extend the scope of its DevOps platform to provide a view into the software development life cycle for not just developers but also designers, product managers and business leaders.

Fresh off raising an additional $268 million in funding, GitLab now plans to create different ways to view a common pool of metadata and metrics generated by the GitLab DevOps platform.

It may be a while before GitLab can deliver on that promise, but the core concept builds on the dashboards the company already has built for IT operations and cybersecurity teams. Rather than requiring each team participating in the software development process to acquire a separate platform, GitLab should be viewed as a DevOps platform delivered as a single application that can now be applied to everyone, said Mark Pundsack, vice president of product strategy for GitLab, in speaking with conference attendees.

As part of that commitment, Pundsack noted GitLab is expanding its DevSecOps capabilities to include auto remediation. The scanning capabilities built into GitLab will be extended not only to detect issues based on the cybersecurity policies of an organization, but also, when allowed, automatically remediate routine issues, Pundsack said, adding GitLab also will automatically roll back applications if necessary. Once in place, GitLab will have pushed application cybersecurity much further left than anyone might have expected when DevSecOps was first broached as a concept, he said.

At the conference, GitLab demonstrated a pipeline graph capability that will provide a foundation for many of these promised offerings. GitLab already can be employed to accomplish tasks such as code quality scanning, container scanning, dependency scanning and licensing dependencies.

All these features are an extension of GitLab’s existing strategy that aims to rationalize the number of tools organizations need to stitch together to drive a set of best DevOps processes. However, other DevOps platform providers have similar ambitions.

Thanks to its latest round of funding, GitLab—which also announced its plans to go public next year—is now valued at $2.75 billion. The company has not released any revenue results but does claim to support more than 100,000 organizations using its platform, including Ask Media Group, Charter Communications, Delta Air Lines, Goldman Sachs, Ticketmaster and Nvidia. GitLab also claims to have more than 4,800 active contributors to its open core platform. The company now has more than 800 employees in more than 55 countries across the globe, and there currently are 222 open GitLab jobs posted.

It remains to be seen how much $268 million will enable GitLab to fend off rivals such as GitHub, which was acquired by Microsoft, and CloudBees, which has built a large DevOps community around the open source Jenkins continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) platform. Whatever the outcome of this arms race, the massive amount of funding pouring into the platforms soon should take DevOps platforms to places many might not have ever imagined possible.

— Mike Vizard