GitLab is transforming its offerings of version control and continuous integration with a new integrated and automatic DevOps experience: Auto DevOps.
Auto DevOps, a concept that was designed to help developers deliver ideas to production faster, is GitLab’s new collection of features for building, testing and deploying applications, as well as features for review apps and setting up code quality.
These features are critical to DevOps, according to Mark Pundsack, head of product at GitLab, and while they exist at some level within GitLab already, the idea is to “level them up” and have the components enabled automatically with no configuration from developers, he said.
“We realize auto has some ambiguity, since much of DevOps is about automation,” said Pundsack. “What we really mean [by Auto DevOps] is it is just automatically enabled so you don’t have to configure anything. It’s a zero-click installation or configuration idea.”
Auto DevOps features, to be available through GitLab’s platform, will include Auto Create, Auto Build, Auto CI, Auto Deploy, Auto Code Quality, and Auto Review Apps. GitLab’s Auto Deploy feature has already been shipped, and Code Quality was released in GitLab 9.3, but not for an auto version, said Pundsack. GitLab has a CI feature but it’s not automated yet. The significant difference with Auto CI is GitLab will be able to detect what language the developer is using and it will run tests for that specific language. This way, a developer doesn’t have to configure anything, said Pundsack.
Auto DevOps takes away the hassle of getting started with DevOps, said Pundsack. There are a series of steps developers need to take when configuring their continuous integration pipeline, for instance, and they need to understand how to run tests in an automatic way, how to set up various parts of their configuration, and how to optimize the flow once it is set up, he said.
“Knowing how to do that becomes a learning curve that everyone needs to step through,” said Pundsack. “Automating your deployment once you have continuous integration, that’s great, but now you need to deliver and automate that process and make it repeatable.”
Developers will be able to access Auto DevOps features on GitLab’s site. The core functionality for Auto DevOps will be available for GitLab’s free tier version, so developers can push their code and it will automatically go to test, deploy, and everything will configure automatically, said Pundsack. Specific features will be available at the higher level tiers, and certain visualizations and functionality will not be available at the free tier level.
