GitLab Announces Complete DevOps and Raising $20 Million in New Venture Capital Funding

During a recent GitLab live event, GitLab made several interesting  announcements:

1. They presented their vision of “Complete DevOps”, and demonstrated capabilities that will soon be incorporated into their product.
2. They announced that they had raised $20 million in new venture capital funding led by Google Ventures (GV). So far, the total amount of funding raised by GitLab exceeds $45 million.
3. Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, has joined the GitLab board.

The full recording of the event is below:

Now for some more details about these announcements:

Complete DevOps vision and future product capabilities

Sid Sijbrandij, the CEO of GitLab, presented the vision of Complete DevOps (expected to be completed during 2018).  The idea is to include both developers and operations teams in one unified solution. Currently, GitLab covers (almost) every stage from idea to production. However, after a product reaches the production stage, there are still operations, and now GitLab intends to add capabilities that would support that stage too. As a result, GitLab will become a complete DevOps tool chain.

As a result, the following features will be added to GitLab during the next 6 months

• Real-time editing of issues, merge requests and files, which shows in real-time who is currently changing the text (similar to Google Docs and Office 365) . See slide 40 in the upcoming presentation.
• Portfolio management, including GANTT charts (slides 42-43).
• Web IDE, which lets you write code on any device, without the need for an IDE client’s installation (slide 46).
• Performance testing and security scanning will be included in the CI component (slides 49-50).
• Improved Container Registry capabilities. You can already use the Container Registry to pack your product into a Docker container (slide 53).
• Binary Repository for management of binary files (slide 54).
• GitLab Tracing allows you to display traces of GitLab’s microservices (slide 71).
• Auto Alerts: automatic detection and alerting of system anomalies (slide 72).
• Ops View: An overview of all the production apps with the option to zero in on individual apps. (slide 73).
• Auto Log automatically gathers and searches the logs of applications that are deployed by GitLab (slide 74).

and much more…

Slides about the above features can be found in this set, presented at the event:

Some interesting facts presented at the event (also mentioned on  the slides)

• GitLab has a 67% share of on-premise Git installations (slide 4).
• More than 1,800 programmers contribute code to the GitLab open source version, which is the version on which the Enterprise versions are based (slide 5).
• GitLab CI/CD component is the leader among CI/CD tools, according to this month’s Forrester Research survey (slide 8).

What does it all mean? My personal viewpoint on GitLab’s vision

The vision is very interesting – and very ambitious. They intend to put the whole application lifecycle management under a single roof – theirs.

Based on previous experience (quite short, as GitLab was incorporated only 3 years ago) and considering their “army” of more than 1800 volunteers who contribute code to the product + the capital (just obtained) + a strong team of employees + use of open-source tools + the current market share, I think that this is possible. Yet they should beware of trying to do too much at once.

I think that in the beginning they will release only basic features of each planned component and afterwards GitLab will improve and stabilize them in a gradual but fast pace.

It’s important to remember that they have not yet decided which features will appear in each GitLab edition (GitLab has a free Community Edition and two paid Enterprise Editions, which include support). I suppose that for each feature they will make a decision just before its release.

It’s also important to remember that GitLab supports integration with other tools (like JIRA, Jenkins, etc.), and I think that this support will continue. In other words, you will not be obliged to use all parts of the system: you will be able to “turn off” undesired parts of the system and instead continue using other tools, either because you are already familiar with them or because of their better functionality.

$20 million venture capital funding led by Google Ventures

GV, Google’s venture capital arm, joins GitLab as an investor. In my opinion, this shows their faith in the product and the company’s vision. Association with Google will cause GitLab to continue developing CI/CD-related features based on Kubernetes, a Google-supported container management tool.

Also, I assume that the public cloud of GitLab (named / which is GitLab.com website) will be moved to get hosted in Google cloud.

WordPress founder’s joining the GitLab board

Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, has joined the GitLab advisory board. I think this shows the open source community’s faith in GitLab. It also indicates that GitLab will continue being dominant among that community and will continue being based on its free open-source Community Edition. For those who don’t know about WordPress: it is the most popular platform for building sites and blogs. It is open source-based, and today about 25% of Internet sites are based on it.

In short – it will be interesting! I will continue following GitLab developments, and you are invited to stay updated by joining our GitLab mailing list below, our twitter or our facebook page.

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