Writing and delivering quality software poses many challenges. First, you must solve tough business problems and craft great code. But the challenges don’t stop there. You have to ensure your code is fast, secure, and bug-free. You will need to build, integrate, test, secure, review, configure, and deploy your code. Creating and managing this pipeline is time consuming and complex.
Beyond making it easy to host and collaborate on public and private repositories, GitLab also simplifies the rest of the process by offering the whole delivery toolchain, built in. And now, it’s not only built in, it’s automated. Simply commit your code and Auto DevOps can do the rest. Auto DevOps is a pre-built, fully featured CI/CD pipeline that automates the entire delivery process. It is Generally Available and ready for prime time in GitLab 11.0.
Other key features we have released in GitLab 11.0 include License Management to automatically detect licenses of your project’s dependencies; enhanced Security Testingof your code, containers, and dependencies; further Kubernetes integration features; an enhanced Web IDE; enhanced Epic and Roadmap views; Incremental Rollouts; and much more.
First, some more detail about these key features.
Auto DevOps covers the end-to-end lifecycle: Simply commit your code to GitLab, then Auto DevOps does the rest: building, testing, code quality scanning, security scanning, license scanning, packaging, performance testing, deploying, and monitoring your application.
“GitLab is a key part of our software-delivery processes and because of them, we’ve improved our delivery velocity by four times and made it immensely easier for our teams to collaborate,” said Chris Hill, head of systems engineering for infotainment at Jaguar Land Rover.
“We’re excited about Auto DevOps, because it will allow us to focus on writing code and business value. GitLab can then handle the rest; automatically building, testing, deploying, and even monitoring our application.”
License Management (software composition analysis): Software is often a complex amalgamation of code that includes external components (libraries, frameworks, and utilities). Each component typically includes specific license permissions and limitations, so you need to track and manage these dependencies for your application. GitLab 11.0 includes License Management (software composition analysis) built into the Merge Request so you can track and manage the included licenses.
Security: This month we continue to improve GitLab’s built-in security capabilities so you can “shift security left” and catch vulnerabilities early via integrated Static and Dynamic Application Security Testing, along with Dependency and Container Scanning. Specifically, we’ve extended coverage of Static Analysis Security Testing (SAST) to include Scala and .Net. We’re also including more details in the SAST reports so you can get insight about specific issues right there.
Kubernetes: As part of our ongoing effort to improve the integration with Kubernetes and make it easy for you to manage and monitor Kubernetes from GitLab, there are several new features. Most notably, when you need to debug or check on a pod, you can review the Kubernetes pod logs directly from GitLab’s deployment board.
GitLab Web IDE: The more work you can do directly from the IDE, the more productive you can be. Now, you are able to view your CI/CD pipelines from the IDE and get immediate feedback if a pipeline fails. Switching tasks can be disruptive, so the updated Web IDE makes it easy to quickly switch to the next merge request, to create, improve, or review without leaving the Web IDE. This way, you can stay in the flow of writing and reviewing code changes.
Navigate Epics / Roadmaps: When you want to visualize how Epics and Roadmaps flow over time, it can be helpful to change the time scale and zoom out. We’ve updated the Epic/Roadmap navigation interface to make it easier to see the big picture and make planning easier.
Originally introduced in beta in GitLab 10.0, Auto DevOps is now Generally Available (GA) in GitLab 11.0. Auto DevOps provides a complete workflow for your project with minimal configuration, efficiently taking your application from the build stage through the production and monitoring stage.
Auto DevOps brings DevOps best practices to your project by automatically configuring your build, test, Code Quality, Static and Dynamic Security Testing, Dependency Scanning, License Management, Container Scanning, Review Apps, Browser Performance Testing, deployment, and monitoring in a single application. It makes it easy for teams adopting DevOps to start with a complete, holistic pipeline.
Auto DevOps enables developers to focus on what matters most to the organization – shipping code that brings value to their customers.
Continuous integration is an important step in shipping high-quality software, and you can now check the CI status of the current commit at a glance by checking the status bar at the bottom left of the Web IDE. Even better, you can view the status of each job and the logs for each job on the right. This makes makes it easy to fix a merge request with CI failures by opening the failed job side by side with the file you’re working on.
Previously, fixing failed tests involved opening multiple tabs and switching backwards and forwards. Now, all the information you need can be opened right in the Web IDE, and in the future you’ll be able to preview and test your changes before you commit them.
Switch between merge requests in the Web IDE