GitLab Opens CI/CD to GitHub Users

As GitLab continues to build upon its powerful solution set focused on meeting the needs of the entire DevOps lifecycle, they took another major step forward today, by offering their CI/CD pipeline solution to GitHub/GitHub Enterprise customers. This means that businesses, users, and open source projects can standardize on GitLab CI/CD across their repositories running on GitHub, GitHub Enterprise, and GitLab.

Open source projects hosting on GitHub can leverage GitLab.com for top tier features at no cost.

Sid Sijbrandij, CEO and co-founder of GitLab, recognizes the need for DevOps, stating:

" Continuous integration and deployment form the backbone of modern DevOps. With this new offering, businesses and open source projects that use GitHub as a code repository will have access to GitLab’s industry leading CI/CD capabilities."

What This Means

In most of the Fortune 1000 corporations I have worked, the reality I have seen is different deployment strategies across not only sibling entities, but within a given subsidiary as well. Prior to this announcement, it was understandable, as git-based repositories relied on complimentary solutions from CloudBees, CircleCI, TravisCI, and Atlassian.

When GitLab entered the market, their focus was to build a single application that meets the needs of every aspect of the DevOps lifecycle. As repositories begin to emerge on the GitLab service, those customers began to see the real value of such an application.

Now, customers on GitHub/GitHub Enterprise can utilize those same CI/CD features, allowing the ability to standardize a single solution across the entire enterprise.

How It Works

With the new offering, GitLab users can create a new CI/CD project in GitLab that is connected to an external GitHub repository. This link will automatically prompt GitLab CI/CD to run whenever code is pushed to GitHub and post the CI/CD results back to the source repository when the process has completed. The seamless integration between GitLab and GitHub should lessen the challenges with implementing a complimentary solution into a GitLab source repository.

About GitLab

GitLab continues to drive the CI/CD tool space. In fact, in 2017 Forrester gave GitLab the highest mark in their Current Offering evaluation, citing GitLab as the leader across the entire landscape with the strongest strategy in place.

Forrester: Continuous Integration Tools, Q3 2017

I have used GitLab for several of my personal projects, like Random Generator. I became hooked on GitLab because of their ability to have everything self-contained in one service. For me, that included source repository, issue tracking, build automation, project documentation, wiki, and (of course) CI/CD. If you have not taken the time to review the GitLab solution, it should certainly be on your short-list to review for CI/CD solutions.

Have a really great day!