Accelerating DevOps Cultural Adoption with GitLab

One year ago, our team made an investment into a self-hosted installation of GitLab.

We had been successful in delivering a managed GitLab installation at a customer site and saw the value in taking advantage of everything the platform had to offer for our internal workloads. As an AWS DevOps Competency partner, we have a successful track record of helping organizations adopt DevOps processes and we understand that the biggest challenge is often aligning an organization’s culture with DevOps principles.

GitLab has helped us bridge that gap by demonstrating the operational excellence that can be achieved with DevOps.

GitLab’s biggest strength is that it addresses all stages of the software development lifecycle. GitLab’s features align strongly with the stages and principles our team has outlined in our DevOps process. The cornerstone of this DevOps process is that everything is delivered as code and all code is continuously version-controlled, tested, and cross-checked by peers. The marriage of GitLab’s repository tools with their built-in CI platform eliminates much of the overhead of setting up continuous integration and testing. Our team has built custom pipeline templates specifically designed around deployments using AWS, CloudFormation, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, and other platforms. These pipeline templates allow new projects to inherit shared knowledge and hit the ground running to deliver operational excellence with Agile development speed. We’ve also committed ourselves to share these templates and learned best practices with the community to aid others in quickly and efficiently adopting GitLab and cloud and driving new development.

Our team has designed a one-click style deployment of GitLab on AWS with high availability and security out-of-the-box. We’re using this solution to help other organizations rapidly adopt GitLab and have been successful in doing so at several government and commercial organizations. We also have a one-click GitLab Runner on AWS solution available for scalable, secure GitLab CI runners.

GitLab has been a cornerstone of our DevOps practice, and we are just getting started. We have empowered organizations to automate software testing and deployments using GitLab as the engine, and organizations have been able to move faster and better address end-users with those abilities. We’re excited to see what organizations can do with the power that DevOps’ operational excellence gives them, and we’ve partnered with GitLab to accelerate them along that journey.

If you or your organization has more questions in regards to GitLab or our DevOps process, contact us to set up some time to chat about your business goals.