Introduction to GitLab
Gitlab is a lifecycle tool that provides a vast repository on web-based DevOps. It provides issue tracking on CI/CD pipeline features by using an open-source license.
The license is issued in the GitLab Inc. It is created by Valery Sizov on a multiple by tech enterprises such as IBM Sony, Cisco, Juniper, Oracle, and so on. The code in Gitlab is available from many program languages and mostly it is written in Ruby and fewer parts are scripted in Go.
The code source management is developed to support the software development lifecycle. But now the Gitlab is emerged Ruby and Rails, Go and Vue.js. Some important features, advantages, and limitations of Gitlab are explained in this article.
Why we use GitLab
The applications of GitLab provide the functionality to make automation of the complete DevOps which makes a plan to design, create, build, verify, test, deploy, and monitoring on scalability, reputation, availability, and replication.
The usage of GitLab is increasing day by day. Because of its wide features and brick blocks of code availability. The collaboration of code platforms is central which can be reused and implemented.
It contains many CI/CD pipeline, container registry, integration of Kubernetes, and offers the best data portability. The data integration and monitoring make the GitLab more sustainable.
The projects of GitLab can be made private and public and it is made as an open-source to provide free access to everyone.
The public repository on GitLab can be used for wikis, documentation, and tracking of issues. The GitLab enables the team to collaborate and work on the code which is scripted in Go and Ruby.
It is aimed to store the information and array of committed objects with a bunch of references to it.
It acts as a central hub where the beginners and developers are used to create, store, test, share, and collaborate on all the web projects.
Features of GitLab
The features of GitLab allows a powerful continuous integration and well-integrated continuous development pipelines.
By using GitLab, it can prefer to pay and use the scheme to manually integrate the exterior CI services. For example, the CircleCI is an example of well-defined CI/CD pipelines of GitLab. The docker makes everything with the freely available container.
It has an in-built registry that is instantly deployed without the need for configuration. The third-party servers are deployed to manage the docker images by using GitLab. The infrastructure management shows how properly the Kubernetes are organized in the GitLab.
It creates a natural fit that is perfectly suitable for Kubernetes integration in it. The deployment of every branch and conduct every basic quality assurance in the real feature to merging of the Dev team and QA team and this collaboration becomes more effective.
The project management offered in GitLab is and provides extensive and adaptable to all the workflow using GitLab boards. The examples offered by GitLab project management are group milestones, burnup, and burndown charts, issues of targeted dates, moving issues in between projects, and preparation of CSV exports.
It can import enormous projects when compared to GitHub and also enable them to export other codes in the projects. The integrated monitoring is supported by GitLab to gather all the performance measures for both applications and servers.
It let the user define the effects of combining both branch and production systems. The quick actions are possible only with it to make the coding compact easy and implied instantly.
Importance of GitLab
The other features of GitLab are setting and grouping of milestones, fixing a team and individual deadlines, shuffling and tracking of issues, configuration of many issues boards, focus and grouping of issue boards, managing multiple issue boards, labelling and resource to issue assignment.
merging, assigning and closing of issues, configuring the issue closing sequences, fixing and setting the feature map and road maps, time tracking of confidential issues, marking of associated issues, burndown charts, integration of confidential issues, enrichment of marked issues, chat management issues, web based IDE’s, provide all time available service desk, the marked and described labels and protected tags, finder of fuzzy files, fast forward merges and squashed merges, the request and approval for merges.
the conflict resolution on merges, statistical graph representation and report marking, discussion on merge request commit, email merge request, cherry picks up changes, activity streams, notification of customers, locking of files, branching and protected streams, permission and restriction of user access, incorporation of Git empowered WiKi, discussion, and resolution of images, templates, and inline comments, import of GitLab.com, debugging of containers, dynamic and static application and security, comprehensive pipelines graphics, quality report of codes.
in-built CI/CD and container registry, chat deployment, secured and verification of custom domains, static web push, online visualization of HTML artifacts, triggering of scheduled pipelines, Jekyll plugin, auto DevOps, support of multiple Kubernetes cluster, monitoring of servers and applications, performance testing and load balancing of the servers and web browsers, widely used in subgroups, disaster recovery, compliance tools, inner sourcing, integration and analytics on API and management of everyday activities.
Advantages and Disadvantages
- The significant advantage of GitLab is it is available for free and easy to manage and configure it.
- it enables only a limited number of private repository, integrate several API and third-party server and consume only a reliable uptime.
- The code reviews and pulls up request made it more compact and user-friendly.
- The few limitations of GitLab is it not commendable as expected and the user interface makes it more complicated for review.
- But GitLab is available with many bugs which makes it a little sloppy.
- The GitLab is a cloud-native application that is implied with enormous security measures stating from granular restrictions and permissions using Kerberos for user authentication.
- By using GitLab, the team and members provide minimal integration to accomplish the software development lifecycle. GitLab has relied on Git where the user is not restricted and rapid accessibility to development history and also creates a more building application.