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than 3,000 contributions to GitLab. These contributors include team members from global organizations like Thales, Scania, and Kitware, who are helping shape GitLab's future through the [Co-Create Program](https://about.gitlab.com/community/co-create/) — GitLab's collaborative development program where customers work directly with GitLab engineers to contribute meaningful features to the platform.\n\nThrough workshops, pair programming sessions, and ongoing support, program participants get hands-on experience with GitLab's architecture and codebase while solving issues or improving existing features.\n\n\"Our experience with the Co-Create Program has been incredible,\" explains Sébastien Lejeune, open source advocate at Thales. \"It only took two months between discussing our contribution with a GitLab Contributor Success Engineer and getting it live in the GitLab release.\"\n\nIn this post, we'll explore how customers have leveraged the Co-Create Program to turn their ideas into code, learning and contributing along the way.\n\n## The Co-Create experience\n[The GitLab Development Kit (GDK)](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-development-kit) helps contributors get started developing on GitLab. \"The advice I would give new contributors is to remember that you can't break anything with the GDK,\" says Hook. \"If you make a change and it doesn't work, you can undo it or start again. The beauty of GDK is that you can tinker, test, and learn without worrying about the environment.\"\n\nEach participating organization in the Co-Create Program receives support throughout their contribution journey:\n\n- __Technical onboarding workshop__: A dedicated session to set up the GitLab Development Kit (GDK) and understand GitLab's architecture\n- __1:1 engineering support__: Access to GitLab engineers for pair programming and technical guidance\n- __Architecture deep dives__: Focused sessions on specific GitLab components relevant to the issue the organization is contributing to\n- __Code review support__: Detailed feedback and guidance through the merge request process\n- __Regular check-ins__: Ongoing collaboration to ensure progress and address any challenges\n\nThis structure ensures that teams can contribute effectively, regardless of their prior experience with GitLab's codebase or the Ruby/Go programming language. As John Parent from Kitware notes, \"If you've never seen or worked with GitLab before, you're staring at a sophisticated architecture and so much code across different projects. The Co-Create Program helps distill what would take weeks of internal training into a targeted crash course.\"\n\nThe result is a program that not only helps deliver new features but also builds lasting relationships between GitLab and its user community. \"It's inspiring for our engineers to see the passion our customers bring to contributing to and building GitLab together,\" shares Shekhar Patnaik, principal engineer at GitLab. \"Customers get to see the 'GitLab way,' and engineers get to witness their commitment to shaping the future of GitLab.\"\n\n## Enhancing project UX with Thales\nWhen Thales identified opportunities to improve GitLab's empty project UI, they didn't just file a feature request — they built the solution themselves. Their contributions focused on streamlining the new project setup experience by simplifying SSH/HTTPS configuration with a tabbed interface and adding copy/paste functionality for the code snippets. These changes had a significant impact on developer workflows.\n\nThe team's impact extended beyond the UX improvements. Quentin Michaud, PhD fellow for cloud applications on the edge at Thales, contributed to improving the GitLab Development Kit (GDK). As a package maintainer for Arch Linux, Michaud's expertise helped improve GDK's documentation and support its containerization efforts, making it easier for future contributors to get started.\n\n\"My open source experience helped me troubleshoot GDK's support for Linux distros,” says Michaud. “While improving package versioning documentation, I saw that GitLab's Contributor Success team was also working to set up GDK into a container. Seeing our efforts converge was a great moment for me — it showed how open source collaboration can help build better solutions.\"\n\nThe positive experience for the Thales team means that Lejeune now uses the Co-Create Program as \"a powerful example to show our managers the return on investment from open source contributions.\"\n\n## Advancing package support with Scania\nWhen Scania needed advanced package support in GitLab, they saw an opportunity to contribute and build it themselves. \n\n\"As long-time GitLab users who actively promote open source within our organization, the Co-Create Program gave us a meaningful way to contribute directly to open source,\" shares Puttaraju Venugopal Hassan, solution architect at Scania.\n\nThe team started with smaller changes to familiarize themselves with the codebase and review process, then progressed to larger features. \"One of the most rewarding aspects of the Co-Create Program has been looking back at the full, end-to-end process and seeing how far we've come,\" reflects Océane Legrand, software developer at Scania. \"We started with discovery and smaller changes, but we took on larger tasks over time. It's great to see that progression.\" \n\nTheir contributions include bug fixes for the package registry and efforts to enhance the Conan package registry feature set, bringing it closer to general availability (GA) readiness while implementing Conan version 2 support. Their work and collaboration with GitLab demonstrates how the Co-Create Program can drive significant improvements to GitLab’s package registry capabilities.\n\n\"From the start, our experience with the Co-Create Program was very organized. We had training sessions that guided us through everything we needed to contribute. One-on-one sessions with a GitLab engineer also gave us an in-depth look at GitLab’s package architecture, which made the contribution process much smoother,\" said Juan Pablo Gonzalez, software developer at Scania. \n\nThe impact of the program goes beyond code — program participants are also building valuable skills as a direct result of their contributions. In [the GitLab 17.8 release](https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2025/01/16/gitlab-17-8-released/#mvp), both Legrand and Gonzalez were recognized as GitLab MVPs. Legrand talked about how the work she's doing in open source impacts both GitLab and Scania, including building new skills for her and her team: \"Contributing through the Co-Create Program has given me new skills, like experience with Ruby and background migrations. When my team at Scania faced an issue during an upgrade, I was able to help troubleshoot because I'd already encountered it through the Co-Create Program.\"\n\n## Optimizing authentication for high-performance computing with Kitware\nKitware brought specialized expertise from their work with national laboratories to improve GitLab's authentication framework. Their contributions included adding support for the OAuth2 device authorization grant flow in GitLab, as well as implementing new database tables, controllers, views, and documentation. This contribution enhances GitLab's authentication options, making it more versatile for devices without browsers or with limited input capabilities.\n\n\"The Co-Create Program is the most efficient and effective way to contribute to GitLab as an external contributor,\" shares John Parent, R&D engineer at Kitware. \"Through developer pairing sessions, we found better implementations that we might have missed working alone.\"\n\nAs a long-time open source contributor, Kitware particularly appreciated GitLab's approach to development. \"I assumed GitLab wouldn't rely on out-of-the-box solutions at its scale, but seeing them incorporate a Ruby dependency instead of building a custom in-house solution was great,” says Parent. “Coming from the C++ world, where package managers are rare, it was refreshing to see this approach and how straightforward it could be.\"\n\n## Building better together: Benefits of Co-Create\nThe Co-Create Program creates value that flows both ways. \"The program bridges a gap between us as GitLab engineers and our customers,\" explains Imre Farkas, staff backend engineer at GitLab. \"As we work with them, we hear their day-to-day challenges, the parts of GitLab they rely on, and where improvements can be made. It's great to see how enthusiastic they are about getting involved in building GitLab with us.\"\n\nThis collaborative approach also accelerates GitLab's development. As Shekhar Patnaik, principal engineer at GitLab, observes: \"Through Co-Create, our customers are helping us move our roadmap forward. Their contributions allow us to deliver critical features faster, benefitting our entire user base. As the program scales, there's a real potential to accelerate development on our most impactful features by working alongside the very people who rely on them.\"\n\n## Get started with Co-Create\nReady to turn your feature requests into reality? Whether you're looking to enhance GitLab's UI like Thales, improve package support like Scania, or optimize authentication like Kitware, the Co-Create Program welcomes organizations who want to actively shape GitLab's future while building valuable open source experience.\n\nContact your GitLab representative to learn more about participating in the Co-Create Program, or visit our [Co-Create page](https://about.gitlab.com/community/co-create/) for more information.\n",[679,680,681],"contributors","open source","customers",{"slug":683,"featured":92,"template":684},"the-co-create-program-how-customers-are-collaborating-to-build-gitlab","BlogPost","content:en-us:blog:the-co-create-program-how-customers-are-collaborating-to-build-gitlab.yml","The Co Create Program How Customers Are Collaborating To Build Gitlab","en-us/blog/the-co-create-program-how-customers-are-collaborating-to-build-gitlab.yml","en-us/blog/the-co-create-program-how-customers-are-collaborating-to-build-gitlab",[690,711,732,753,773,795,815,834,853,872,892,911,931,955,974],{"_path":691,"_dir":245,"_draft":6,"_partial":6,"_locale":7,"seo":692,"content":697,"config":705,"_id":707,"_type":16,"title":708,"_source":17,"_file":709,"_stem":710,"_extension":20},"/en-us/blog/kingfisher-transforming-the-developer-experience-with-gitlab",{"title":693,"description":694,"ogTitle":693,"ogDescription":694,"noIndex":6,"ogImage":668,"ogUrl":695,"ogSiteName":670,"ogType":671,"canonicalUrls":695,"schema":696},"Kingfisher transforming the developer experience with GitLab","Learn how the international company focuses on DevSecOps, including automation, to reduce complexity in workflows for better efficiency.","https://about.gitlab.com/blog/kingfisher-transforming-the-developer-experience-with-gitlab","\n                        {\n        \"@context\": \"https://schema.org\",\n        \"@type\": \"Article\",\n        \"headline\": \"Kingfisher transforming the developer experience with GitLab\",\n        \"author\": [{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"name\":\"Sharon Gaudin\"}],\n        \"datePublished\": \"2024-11-12\",\n      }",{"title":693,"description":694,"authors":698,"heroImage":668,"date":700,"body":701,"category":14,"tags":702},[699],"Sharon Gaudin","2024-11-12","Kingfisher plc, an international home improvement company, has leaned into GitLab’s end-to-end platform to help it build a DevSecOps foundation that is revolutionizing its developer experience. And the company plans to continue that improvement by increasing its use of platform features, focusing on security, simplifying its toolchain, and increasing the use of automation.\n\n> \u003Cimg align=\"left\" width=\"200\" height=\"200\" hspace=\"5\" vspace=\"5\" alt=\"Chintan Parmar\" src=\"https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1752176076/Blog/ro7u8p695zw9fllbk4j5.png\" style=\"float: left; margin-right: 25px;\"> “The whole point of this is to reduce friction for our engineers, taking away a lot of the complexity in their workflow, and bringing in best practices and governance,” says Chintan Parmar, site reliability engineering manager at Kingfisher. “In terms of what we've done and what we're doing at the moment, it really is about building a foundation in terms of CI/CD and changing the way we deploy to bring in consistency and improve the developer experience.”\n\nParmar talked about his team and their efforts during the [GitLab DevSecOps World Tour event](https://about.gitlab.com/events/devsecops-world-tour/) in London last month. In an on-stage interview with Sherrod Patching, vice president of Customer Success Management at GitLab, he laid out Kingfisher’s journey with the platform, which is enabling its teams, while also making it easier and faster to move software updates and new projects from ideation to deployment.\n\n[Kingfisher](https://www.kingfisher.com/en/index.html) is a parent company with more than 2,000 stores in eight countries across Europe. Listed on the London Stock Exchange and part of the Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) 100 Index, the group reported £13 billion in total revenue in FY 2023/24. Its brands include B&Q, Screwfix, Castorama, and Brico Depot. \n\nThe company first adopted GitLab in 2016, using a free starter license, and then moved to Premium in 2020. In that time, it also has moved from on-premise to a cloud environment, started using shared GitLab runners and source code management, and began building out a CI/CD library that gives team members easy access to standardized and reusable components for typical pipeline stages, such as build, deploy, and test.\n\n## Tracking metrics that execs care about\n\nKingfisher also is tracking metrics, like deployment frequency, lead time to change, and change failure rates, with GitLab. And teams are analyzing value streams, mapping workflows, and finding bottlenecks. All of those metrics are being translated into data that company leaders can sink their teeth into. \n\n“Execs may not care about whether a merge request has been waiting 15 or 20 minutes, but they do care about how we translate that time value into dollars or pounds,” says Parmar, who used GitLab when he previously worked at [Dunelm Group, plc,](https://about.gitlab.com/customers/dunelm/) another major UK-based retailer. “Kingfisher is a very data-driven organization. We are looking to overlay these metrics to see where we can continue to improve our developer experience, eliminating slowdowns and manual tasks, while increasing automation.”\n\nWhile on-stage, Parmar made it clear that all the changes being made are aimed at improving software development and deployment. However, it’s equally paramount to making team members’ jobs easier, giving them more time and autonomy to do the kind of work they enjoy, instead of what can seem like a never-ending stream of repetitive, manual tasks. He noted that the team is so focused on easing workflows and giving engineers more time to be innovative, it has created a “developer experience squad.”\n\n## Putting people first while laying out priorities\n\nSo what’s coming next for Kingfisher and its engineering squads, which have about 600 practitioners?  \n\nAccording to Parmar, Kingfisher already has its priorities mapped out. Using GitLab to [move security left](https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/security-compliance/) is at the top of their list. The group also is focused on continuing to reduce its toolchain, and using automation to increase productivity. And he expects that early in 2025, teams will begin “dabbling” with the artificial intelligence capabilities in [GitLab Duo](https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-duo/), a suite of AI-powered features in the platform that help increase velocity and solve key pain points across the software development lifecycle. Kingfisher will focus on how that can further increase its efficiency and productivity. \n\nTo get all of this done, Parmar says the first step is to ensure that people come first.\n\n“We’re focused on the hearts and minds of our people... and remembering that people can be attached to how they work through pipelines,” he adds. “People have different ways of building their pipelines. We need to understand what they need, what their workflows look like, and then work with them to find the right solution. After, we’ll go back to them with data that shows the improvements worked. So instead of telling them what they need, we find out what that is, and fix what’s slowing them down. That builds a very good rapport with our engineers.”\n\nChanging how a team creates and deploys software is a journey. Parmar suggests that collaboratively taking developers and security teams on that journey, instead of dragging them along, makes a big difference in ease of migration and in easing team members’ user experience.\n\n> Learn [how other GitLab customers use the DevSecOps platform](https://about.gitlab.com/customers/) to gain results for customers.\n",[681,480,703,704],"DevSecOps","workflow",{"slug":706,"featured":92,"template":684},"kingfisher-transforming-the-developer-experience-with-gitlab","content:en-us:blog:kingfisher-transforming-the-developer-experience-with-gitlab.yml","Kingfisher Transforming The Developer Experience With Gitlab","en-us/blog/kingfisher-transforming-the-developer-experience-with-gitlab.yml","en-us/blog/kingfisher-transforming-the-developer-experience-with-gitlab",{"_path":712,"_dir":245,"_draft":6,"_partial":6,"_locale":7,"seo":713,"content":719,"config":726,"_id":728,"_type":16,"title":729,"_source":17,"_file":730,"_stem":731,"_extension":20},"/en-us/blog/how-indeed-transformed-its-ci-platform-with-gitlab",{"title":714,"description":715,"ogTitle":714,"ogDescription":715,"noIndex":6,"ogImage":716,"ogUrl":717,"ogSiteName":670,"ogType":671,"canonicalUrls":717,"schema":718},"How Indeed transformed its CI platform with GitLab","The world's #1 job site migrated thousands of projects to GitLab CI, boosting productivity and cutting costs. Learn the benefits they realized, including a 79% increase in daily pipelines.","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1750099351/Blog/Hero%20Images/Blog/Hero%20Images/Indeed-blog-cover-image-2_4AgA1DkWLtHwBlFGvMffbC_1750099350771.png","https://about.gitlab.com/blog/how-indeed-transformed-its-ci-platform-with-gitlab","\n                        {\n        \"@context\": \"https://schema.org\",\n        \"@type\": \"Article\",\n        \"headline\": \"How Indeed transformed its CI platform with GitLab\",\n        \"author\": [{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"name\":\"Carl Myers\"}],\n        \"datePublished\": \"2024-08-27\",\n      }",{"title":714,"description":715,"authors":720,"heroImage":716,"date":722,"body":723,"category":14,"tags":724},[721],"Carl Myers","2024-08-27","***Editor's note: From time to time, we invite members of our customer community to contribute to the GitLab Blog. Thanks to Carl Myers, Manager of CI Platforms at Indeed, for sharing your experience with GitLab.***\n\nHere at Indeed, our mission is to help people get jobs. Indeed is the [#1 job site](https://www.indeed.com/about?isid=press_us&ikw=press_us_press%2Freleases%2Faward-winning-actress-viola-davis-to-keynote-indeed-futureworks-2023_textlink_https%3A%2F%2Fwww.indeed.com%2Fabout) in the world with more than 350 million unique visitors every month.\n\nFor Indeed's Engineering Platform teams, we have a slightly different motto: \"We help people to help people get jobs.\" As part of a data-driven engineering culture that has spent the better part of two decades always putting the job seeker first, we are responsible for building the tools that not only make this possible, but empower engineers to deliver positive outcomes to job seekers every day.\n\nGitLab Continuous Integration has allowed Indeed’s CI Platform team of just 11 people to effectively support thousands of users across the company. Other benefits Indeed has realized by moving to GitLab CI include:\n- 79% increase in daily pipelines\n- 10-20% lower CI hardware costs\n- Decreased support burden\n\n## Evolving our CI platform: From Jenkins to a scalable solution\n\nLike many large technology companies, we built our CI platform organically as the company scaled, using the de facto open source and industry standard solutions available at the time. Back in 2007, when Indeed had fewer than 20 engineers, we were using Hudson, Jenkins’ direct predecessor.\n\nToday, through nearly two decades of growth, we have thousands of engineers. As new technology became available, we made incremental improvements, switching to Jenkins around 2011. Another improvement allowed us to move most of our workloads to dynamic cloud worker nodes using [AWS EC2](https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/). As we entered the Kubernetes age, however, the system architecture reached its limits.\n\nJenkins’ architecture was not created with the cloud in mind. Jenkins operates by having a \"controller\" node, a single point of failure that runs critical parts of a pipeline and farms out certain steps to worker nodes (which can scale horizontally to some extent). Controllers are also a manual scaling axis.\n\nIf you have too many jobs to fit on one controller, you must partition your jobs across controllers manually. CloudBees offers ways to mitigate this, including the CloudBees Jenkins Operations Center, which allows you to manage your constellation of controllers from a single centralized place. However, controllers remain challenging to run in a Kubernetes environment because each controller is a fragile single point of failure. Activities like node rollouts or hardware failures cause downtime.\n\nIn addition to the technical limitations baked into Jenkins itself, our CI platform also had several problems of our own making. For example, we used the Groovy Jenkins DSL to generate jobs from code in each repository. This led to each project having its own copy-pasted job pipeline, resulting in hundreds of versions that were hard to maintain and update. While Indeed’s engineering culture values flexibility and allows teams to operate in separate repositories, this flexibility became a burden as teams spent too much time addressing regular maintenance requests.\n\nRecognizing our technical debt, we turned to the [Golden Path pattern](https://tag-app-delivery.cncf.io/whitepapers/platforms/), which allows flexibility while providing a default route to simplify updates and encourage consistent practices across projects.\n\nThe CI Platform team at Indeed is not very large. Our team of around 11 engineers supports thousands of users, fielding support requests, performing upgrades and maintenance, and enabling always-on support for our global company.\n\nBecause our team not only supports our GitLab instance but also the entire CI platform, including the artifact server, our shared build code, and multiple other custom components of our platform, we had our work cut out for us. We needed a plan that would help us address our challenges while making the most efficient use of our existing resources.\n\n## Moving to GitLab CI\n\nAfter a careful design review with key stakeholders, we decided to migrate the entire company from Jenkins to GitLab CI. The primary reasons for choosing GitLab CI were:\n- We were already using GitLab for source code management.\n- GitLab is a complete offering that provides everything we need for CI.\n- GitLab CI is designed for scalability and the cloud.\n- GitLab CI enables us to write templates that extend other templates, which is compatible with our golden path strategy.\n- GitLab is open source software and the GitLab team has always been supportive in helping us submit fixes, giving us extra flexibility and reassurance.\n\nBy the time we officially announced that the GitLab CI Platform would be generally available to users, we already had 23% of all builds happening in GitLab CI from a combination of grassroots efforts and early adopters.\n\nThe challenge of the migration, however, would be the long tail. Due to the number of custom builds in Jenkins, an automated migration tool would not work for the majority of teams. Most of the benefits of the new system would not come until the old system was at 0%. Only then could we turn off the hardware and save the CloudBees license fee.\n\n## Feature parity and the benefits of starting over\n\nThough we support many different technologies at Indeed, the three most common languages are Java, Python, and JavaScript. These language stacks are used to make libraries, deployables (web services or applications), and cron jobs (a process that runs at regular intervals, for example, to build a data set in our data lake). Each of these formed a matrix of project types (Java Library, Python Cronjob, JavaScript Webapp, etc.) for which we had a skeleton in Jenkins. Therefore, we had to produce a golden path template in GitLab CI for each of these project types.\n\nMost users could use these recommended paths without change, but for those who did require customization, the golden path would still be a valuable starting point and enable them to change only what they needed, while still benefiting from centralized template updates in the future.\n\nWe quickly realized that most users, even those with customizations, were happy to take the golden path and at least try it. If they missed their customizations, they could always add them later. This was a surprising result! We thought that teams who had invested in significant customization would be loath to give them up, but in the majority of cases teams just didn't care about them anymore. This allowed us to migrate many projects very quickly — we could just drop the golden path (a small file about 6 lines long with includes) into their project, and they could take it from there.\n\n## InnerSource to the rescue\n\nThe CI Platform team also adopted a policy of \"external contributions first\" to encourage everyone in the company to participate. This is sometimes called InnerSource. We wrote tests and documentation to enable external contributions — contributions from outside our immediate team — so teams that wanted to write customizations could instead include them in the golden path behind a feature flag. This let them share their work with others and ensure we didn't break them moving forward (because they became part of our codebase, not theirs).\n\nThis also had the benefit that particular teams who were blocked waiting for a feature they needed were empowered to work on the feature themselves. We could say \"we plan to implement the feature in a few weeks, but if you need it earlier than that we are happy to accept a contribution.\" In the end, many core features necessary for parity were developed in this manner, more quickly and better than our team had resources to do it. The migration would not have been a success without this model.\n\n## Ahead of schedule and under budget\n\nOur CloudBees license expired on April 1, 2024. This gave us an aggressive target to achieve the full migration. This was particularly ambitious considering that at the time, 80% of all builds (60% of all projects) still used Jenkins for their CI. This meant over 2,000 [Jenkinsfiles](https://www.jenkins.io/doc/book/pipeline/jenkinsfile/) would still need to be rewritten or replaced with our golden path templates.\n\nTo achieve this target, we made documentation and examples available, implemented features where possible, and helped our users contribute features where they were able.\n\nWe started regular office hours, where anyone could come and ask questions or seek our help to migrate. We additionally prioritized support questions relating to migration ahead of almost everything else. Our team became GitLab CI experts and shared that expertise inside our team and across the organization.\n\nAutomatic migration for most projects was not possible, but we discovered it could work for a small subset of projects where customization was rare. We created a Sourcegraph batch change campaign to submit merge requests to migrate hundreds of projects, and poked and prodded our users to accept these MRs.\n\nWe took success stories from our users and shared them widely. As users contributed new features to our golden paths, we advertised that these features \"came free\" when you migrated to GitLab CI. Some examples included built-in security and compliance scanning, Slack notifications for CI builds, and integrations with other internal systems.\n\nWe also conducted a campaign of aggressive \"scream tests.\" We automatically disabled Jenkins jobs that hadn't run or succeeded in a while, and told users that if they needed them, they could turn them back on. This was a low-friction way to identify which jobs were actually needed. We had thousands of jobs that hadn't been run a single time since our last CI migration (which was Jenkins to Jenkins). This told us we could safely ignore almost all of them.\n\nIn January 2024, we nudged our users by announcing that all Jenkins controllers would become read-only (no builds) unless an exception was explicitly requested. We had much better ownership information for controllers and they generally aligned with our organization's structure, so it made sense to focus on controllers rather than jobs. The list of controllers was also a much more manageable list than the list of jobs.\n\nTo obtain an exception, we asked our users to find their controllers in a spreadsheet and put their contact information next to each one. This enabled us to get a guaranteed up-to-date list of stakeholders we could follow up with as we sprinted to the finish line, but also enabled users to clearly let us know which jobs they absolutely needed. At peak, we had about 400 controllers; by January we had 220, but only 54 controllers required exceptions (several of them owned by us, to run our tests and canaries).\n\n![Indeed - Jenkins Controller Count graph](https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1750099357/Blog/Content%20Images/Blog/Content%20Images/image2_aHR0cHM6_1750099357392.png)\n\nWe had a manageable list of around 50 teams we divided among our team and started doing outreach to understand how each team was progressing with the migration. We spent January and February discovering that some teams planned to finish their migration without our help before February 28 others were planning to deprecate their projects before then, and a very small number were very worried they wouldn't make it.\n\nWe were able to work with this smaller set of teams and provide them with “white-glove” service. We still explained that while we lacked the expertise necessary to do the migration for them, we could partner with a subject matter expert from their team. For some projects, we wrote and they reviewed; for others, they wrote and we reviewed. In the end, all of our work paid off and we turned off Jenkins on the very day we had announced 8 months earlier.\n\n## The results: Enhanced CI efficiency and user satisfaction\n\nAt its peak, our Jenkins CI platform ran over 14,000 pipelines per day and serviced our thousands of projects. Today, our GitLab CI platform has run over 40,000 pipelines in a single day and regularly runs over 25,000 per day. The incremental cost of each job of each pipeline is similar to Jenkins, but without the overhead of hardware to run the controllers. Additionally, these controllers served as single points of failure and scaling limiters that forced us to artificially divide our platform into segments. While an apples-to-apples comparison is difficult, we find that with this overhead gone our CI hardware costs are 10-20% lower. Additionally, the support burden of GitLab CI is lower since the application automatically scales in the cloud, has cross-availability-zone resiliency, and the templating language has excellent public documentation available.\n\nA benefit just as important, if not moreso, is that now we are at over 70% adoption of our golden paths. This means that we can roll out an improvement and over 5,000 projects at Indeed will benefit immediately with no action required on their part. This has enabled us to move some jobs to more cost-effective ARM64 instances, keep users' build images updated more easily, and better manage other cost saving opportunities. Most importantly, our users are happier with the new platform.\n\n__About the author:__\n*Carl Myers lives in Sacramento, CA, and is the manager of the CI Platform team at Indeed. Carl has spent his nearly two-decade career dedicated to building internal tools and developer platforms that delight and empower engineers at companies large and small.*\n\n**Acknowledgements:**\n*This migration would not have been possible without the tireless efforts of Tron Nedelea, Eddie Huang, Vivek Nynaru, Carlos Gonzalez, Lane Van Elderen, and the rest of the CI Platform team. The team also especially appreciates the leadership of Deepak Bitragunta, and Irina Tyree for helping secure buy-in, resources and company wide alignment throughout this long project. Finally, our thanks go out to everyone across Indeed who contributed code, feedback, bug reports, and helped migrate projects.*\n\n**This is an edited version of the article [How Indeed Replaced Its CI Platform with Gitlab CI](https://engineering.indeedblog.com/blog/2024/08/indeed-gitlab-ci-migration/), originally published on the Indeed engineering blog.**",[681,110,725,480],"user stories",{"slug":727,"featured":92,"template":684},"how-indeed-transformed-its-ci-platform-with-gitlab","content:en-us:blog:how-indeed-transformed-its-ci-platform-with-gitlab.yml","How Indeed Transformed Its Ci Platform With Gitlab","en-us/blog/how-indeed-transformed-its-ci-platform-with-gitlab.yml","en-us/blog/how-indeed-transformed-its-ci-platform-with-gitlab",{"_path":733,"_dir":245,"_draft":6,"_partial":6,"_locale":7,"seo":734,"content":740,"config":747,"_id":749,"_type":16,"title":750,"_source":17,"_file":751,"_stem":752,"_extension":20},"/en-us/blog/online-retailer-bol-tackles-growing-compliance-needs-with-gitlab",{"title":735,"description":736,"ogTitle":735,"ogDescription":736,"noIndex":6,"ogImage":737,"ogUrl":738,"ogSiteName":670,"ogType":671,"canonicalUrls":738,"schema":739},"Online retailer bol tackles growing compliance needs with GitLab","Learn how GitLab helps the major international company adhere to regulations while increasing development efficiency.","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749665465/Blog/Hero%20Images/blog-image-template-1800x945__15_.png","https://about.gitlab.com/blog/online-retailer-bol-tackles-growing-compliance-needs-with-gitlab","\n                        {\n        \"@context\": \"https://schema.org\",\n        \"@type\": \"Article\",\n        \"headline\": \"Online retailer bol tackles growing compliance needs with GitLab\",\n        \"author\": [{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"name\":\"Julie Griffin\"}],\n        \"datePublished\": \"2024-06-12\",\n      }",{"title":735,"description":736,"authors":741,"heroImage":737,"date":743,"body":744,"category":14,"tags":745},[742],"Julie Griffin","2024-06-12","[Bol](https://www.bol.com/nl/nl/), which uses GitLab Ultimate, is one of the largest online retailers in the Netherlands and Belgium. The company offers a product range of 38 million items alongside 50,000 sales partners who sell their goods on its marketplace. Bol relies on innovative technology to increase development efficiency, adhere to compliance regulations, and maintain trust across its extensive customer base.\n\nBol equips its teams with the GitLab DevSecOps platform, enabling its developers to quickly and securely ship projects, while saving the team thousands of manual hours on compliance checks.\n\n“GitLab is helping us stay flexible and competitive as we grow, and as the requirements that our software and our developers need to comply with grow,” says Guus Houtzager, engineering manager on bol’s Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment team. “That's the biggest challenge that we had and we tackled it with GitLab.”\n\nHowever, as bol's revenue grew, so did the compliance rules and regulations it had to adhere to. The company needs to continually adapt its software to meet strict, and often updated regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), International Organization for Standardization (ISO) requirements, and the EU Artificial Intelligence Act.\n\nAfter adopting GitLab Community in 2016 and GitLab Premium several years later, bol upgraded to GitLab Ultimate in 2024 to [meet the growing compliance load](https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/security-compliance/) and help its teams tackle projects faster and more efficiently.\n\n![Guus Houtzager of bol - quote box](https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749675638/Blog/Content%20Images/bol_Blog_-_Guus.png)\n\n## Saving thousands of developer hours per month \n\nGitLab enables bol’s DevSecOps teams to set up policies that automate compliance configurations and checks. This helps them achieve consistency and scalability in their compliance efforts, and reduce the risk of human error. With compliance guardrails in place, its team of 850 developers can focus more of their energy on creating innovative, secure software.\n\n“We bought GitLab Ultimate so we can have compulsory compliance pipelines that ensures our teams are working within compliance regulations from the start,” says Houtzager.\n\nBy allowing developers to focus on coding without the burden of compliance regulations, the bol development team dramatically increased its efficiency.\n\n“This has saved our developers several thousands of hours in total per month,” says Houtzager.\n\nIn addition to time savings, the team is now confident it can handle any compliance roadblocks that come its way.\n\n“We know that GitLab is going to help us with compliance and software security,” says Houtzager. “Even if we get new regulations, we have a toolkit, through GitLab, that enables us to follow and comply with any new regulations. We don't know exactly what will happen, but we know we are in a position to handle whatever comes our way.”\n\n## Shifting left to protect customers and its business\n\nAs a large player in the European retail world, trust is a key pillar of bol’s business model. The company handles a large quantity of personal data, such as addresses and order details. While regulatory fines are a concern, so is maintaining trust with its customer base. That only emphasizes the importance of security.\n\n“Most of the people in the Netherlands and Belgium have bought something from us in the past and people trust us,” says Houtzager. “They trust that we handle their payment details properly. We don't sell your Personal Identifiable Information PII data, and they trust us to keep it safe and secure.”\n\nTo protect customer data and its business, bol shifted security left, enabling developers to find errors and vulnerabilities earlier in the development process. However, shifting left without the right tools in place could lead to developers spending countless hours trying to correct any problems they find.\n\n“If you shift left without also providing teams the tools, support, and processes to make sure that they can do this work in an efficient manner, teams get bogged down in either procedures or manual work,” says Houtzager.\n\nWith GitLab Ultimate, bol is able to set up the layout and permission model to meet the company’s security requirements, giving developers the freedom to quickly build and ship projects while protecting customer and business data. The DevSecOps platform has the added benefit of tracking the changes and fixes that developers make and noting them in compliance records. \n\n## Looking ahead to AI\n\nMoving forward, bol plans to use more GitLab Ultimate features, like cloud integration, and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, along with even more security features. \n\nFrom building secure software faster to improving the developer experience, bol looks forward to one day using AI-powered [GitLab Duo](https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-duo/) to help them scale their software development. \n\n“The situation must be right for us to be able to use it and then we will definitely take a look at how it can help us,” says Houtzager. “We, like everybody else, are looking at where AI can help us to improve situations across the entire software development life cycle. So if someone is building code, how can it help them? If someone is working on other aspects of the process, how can it help them?” \n\n> Read more customer stories on [the GitLab customers page](https://about.gitlab.com/customers/).\n",[110,746,681,480],"security",{"slug":748,"featured":6,"template":684},"online-retailer-bol-tackles-growing-compliance-needs-with-gitlab","content:en-us:blog:online-retailer-bol-tackles-growing-compliance-needs-with-gitlab.yml","Online Retailer Bol Tackles Growing Compliance Needs With Gitlab","en-us/blog/online-retailer-bol-tackles-growing-compliance-needs-with-gitlab.yml","en-us/blog/online-retailer-bol-tackles-growing-compliance-needs-with-gitlab",{"_path":754,"_dir":245,"_draft":6,"_partial":6,"_locale":7,"seo":755,"content":761,"config":767,"_id":769,"_type":16,"title":770,"_source":17,"_file":771,"_stem":772,"_extension":20},"/en-us/blog/how-carrefour-and-thales-are-evolving-their-ci-cd-platforms",{"title":756,"description":757,"ogTitle":756,"ogDescription":757,"noIndex":6,"ogImage":758,"ogUrl":759,"ogSiteName":670,"ogType":671,"canonicalUrls":759,"schema":760},"How Carrefour and Thales are evolving their CI/CD platforms","Learn how a large retailer and an aerospace and defense company are using GitLab to evolve their CI/CD platforms to increase developer productivity.","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749662061/Blog/Hero%20Images/cicdcover.png","https://about.gitlab.com/blog/how-carrefour-and-thales-are-evolving-their-ci-cd-platforms","\n                        {\n        \"@context\": \"https://schema.org\",\n        \"@type\": \"Article\",\n        \"headline\": \"How Carrefour and Thales are evolving their CI/CD platforms\",\n        \"author\": [{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"name\":\"Kristina Weis\"}],\n        \"datePublished\": \"2024-02-05\",\n      }",{"title":756,"description":757,"authors":762,"heroImage":758,"date":764,"body":765,"category":14,"tags":766},[763],"Kristina Weis","2024-02-05","An efficient and secure CI/CD platform can be especially critical for some organizations — say, a large multinational retailer or an aerospace and defense company. Fortunately, Samuel Le Garec, a technical architect from Carrefour, and Jordan Dubié, Chief Product Owner for the software engineering environment at Thales, joined GitLab for a roundtable discussion at our [DevSecOps World Tour](https://about.gitlab.com/events/devsecops-world-tour/) stop in Paris. They shared their experiences and lessons learned from building CI/CD platforms for thousands of developers, and improving productivity and security along the way.\n\nHere are some of the highlights from their conversation.\n\n**Can you tell me about yourselves and your team?**\n\nDubié: I am the Chief Product Owner of the software factory, which is the software development environment of the Thales Group. [Thales](https://www.thalesgroup.com/en) is a French industrial group that operates in the aerospace, defense, security, and digital identity sectors. Thales is 80,000 people, including 30,000 engineers, specifically 15,000 software engineers. \n\nToday, our team is a little less than 50 people. We also do the build and the run and have a part, therefore, in 24-7 support, following the sun. We have different instances, and we have domains of different sensitivity. So we have several platforms, all self-hosted. On each of these platforms, we deploy the entire environment of the software factory. We also run a part of it, and then we are supported by other teams who take over these activities.\n\nLe Garec: I am an architect at [Carrefour](https://www.carrefour.com/en). I’m responsible for the engineering platform within the software factory and implementing the CI/CD platforms for the development teams. We have between 1,000 and 1,500 developers, so they commit like crazy. Today, I have a team of about 15 people. Our primary focus is to evolve the CI/CD platform, operate it, and manage incidents. We do that 24-7 today. We work mainly for the IT department in France. Then, I have other people who set up all the CI/CD templating and blueprints, the goal being to speed up the project as much as possible.\n\n**Can you share some numbers to give us a sense for the scale of GitLab in your organization?**\n\nDubié: Since we’ve been using GitLab, we’re at 30,000 projects, 70,000 issues, and 280,000 merge requests.\n\nLe Garec: At Carrefour, I think we have less GitLab experience than Jordan since we got our GitLab subscription at the beginning of the year. We have over 10,000 projects today on our CI/CD platform and then many pipeline executions, builds, and deployments that are as automated as possible. And we have 100,000 commits per month, to give you an idea of our activity.\n\n**What was it like before GitLab?**\n\nDubié: It was a very heterogeneous environment. We had all these different business entities, each with their own IT teams that were on site. I was in Toulouse, but there was an entity in Bordeaux, as well. The different environments in Bordeaux, Toulouse, Valence, and Paris were completely separate platforms. That was a major obstacle to collaboration in the group. We had all these heterogeneous platforms with tools that, most of the time, hadn’t been updated in three to four years. So, in terms of functionality, we were far behind the market's state of the art.\n\nLe Garec: We were deploying many different tools. We realized that maintaining our platform was becoming more and more complicated as the maturity of the development teams increased. They always asked us for more tools, and we reached a point where we couldn’t afford to do it anymore. That’s when we thought about an all-in-one solution. And that’s when we chose GitLab.\n\n**Is GitLab new for you? What are your initial goals?**\n\nLe Garec: GitLab is new for us — we started using it in April of this year. We are using GitLab Ultimate SaaS. Our goal is to use as many GitLab Ultimate features as possible. Our plan for the first two or three years is to migrate our source code to GitLab. So far, we’ve managed to move off of Bitbucket. Our next goal is to get rid of Jenkins and move to GitLab CI.\n\n> Learn [how to migrate from Jenkins to GitLab](https://about.gitlab.com/blog/jenkins-to-gitlab-migration-made-easy/).\n\n**How has GitLab helped to improve the speed and quality of your delivery processes?**\n\nDubié: We bet everything on automation. We go all out on everything that can support CI/CD so that developers can get feedback as quickly as possible. We also use SAST, DAST, secret detection, and software composition analysis.\n\nOne thing that was important for us was autonomy. We try to give our developers as much autonomy as possible so that people can create their own group projects. It seems very simple, but in the previous platform with Bitbucket, you had to go through tickets to have that; it was not in the hands of the developers. Today, there is much more autonomy, which allows them to go faster.\n\nWe also benefit from common, shared features; the shared runners, for example, are something we appreciate. We are already working on them because they will add a lot of value for developers who today have difficulties having a development environment that meets their expectations.\n\n**How would you describe an ideal software delivery process with GitLab?**\n\nLe Garec: For me, an almost ideal delivery process is full automation with everything automated — the build, the test, the releases, the versioning, and the deployment, using deployment techniques such as canary deployments and feature flags. For me, that’s something we want and need to go to, at Carrefour at least.\n\n**What are the reactions of the users or developers using GitLab?**\n\nLe Garec: They are pleased. One of the reasons we went to GitLab was the lack of features we had on Bitbucket. Bitbucket had some features, but every time you have to add plugins, it’s paid every time. It’s annoying. So that’s why we went to GitLab and the whole set of features that GitLab offers. It pleases the users to have a homogeneous platform where they don’t have to change tools every five minutes. It improves their productivity, and we have fewer incidents.\n\n*Editor's note: This blog post is based on an edited version of the session transcript that was translated from French.*\n",[110,681,703],{"slug":768,"featured":92,"template":684},"how-carrefour-and-thales-are-evolving-their-ci-cd-platforms","content:en-us:blog:how-carrefour-and-thales-are-evolving-their-ci-cd-platforms.yml","How Carrefour And Thales Are Evolving Their Ci Cd Platforms","en-us/blog/how-carrefour-and-thales-are-evolving-their-ci-cd-platforms.yml","en-us/blog/how-carrefour-and-thales-are-evolving-their-ci-cd-platforms",{"_path":774,"_dir":245,"_draft":6,"_partial":6,"_locale":7,"seo":775,"content":781,"config":789,"_id":791,"_type":16,"title":792,"_source":17,"_file":793,"_stem":794,"_extension":20},"/en-us/blog/southwest-looking-to-help-developers-take-flight",{"title":776,"description":777,"ogTitle":776,"ogDescription":777,"noIndex":6,"ogImage":778,"ogUrl":779,"ogSiteName":670,"ogType":671,"canonicalUrls":779,"schema":780},"Southwest looking to help developers take flight","Learn how the airline's DevOps teams are dramatically increasing their ability to detect and resolve problems with GitLab.","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749665272/Blog/Hero%20Images/AdobeStock_380312133.jpg","https://about.gitlab.com/blog/southwest-looking-to-help-developers-take-flight","\n                        {\n        \"@context\": \"https://schema.org\",\n        \"@type\": \"Article\",\n        \"headline\": \"Southwest looking to help developers take flight\",\n        \"author\": [{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"name\":\"Sharon Gaudin\"}],\n        \"datePublished\": \"2024-01-30\",\n      }",{"title":776,"description":777,"authors":782,"heroImage":778,"date":783,"body":784,"category":14,"tags":785},[699],"2024-01-30","Southwest Airlines Co. is working to make developers’ jobs easier.\n\nIT leaders at the world's largest low-cost carrier are moving to eliminate time-consuming and repetitive tasks from developers’ workflows, freeing their time and increasing their ability to focus on bigger projects.\n\n“The way we do that is by getting things out of their way,” said Jim Dayton, vice president and CISO at Southwest Airlines. “I am a firm believer that people go into software development because they love the creativity of it. They love the ability to solve problems. What we have to do is get out of their way and get the things that are blocking them out of their way.”\n\nPart of how Dayton is making that happen is by using GitLab’s platform.\n\nDayton talked about Southwest’s efforts to take care of their developers, and promote the work they’re doing, during an on-stage interview at the Dallas stop of [GitLab’s DevSecOps World Tour](https://about.gitlab.com/events/devsecops-world-tour/). He also spent part of his conversation with Reshmi Krishna, director of Enterprise Solutions Architecture at GitLab, discussing what benefits he hopes artificial intelligence capabilities will be able to offer his teams.\n\nThe Southwest exec, who said they’re moving toward a DevOps approach to application development, added that they’re providing developers with more self-service capabilities and knowledge management processes. “We want developers to be able to quickly look up a problem, look up a solution, and reduce context switching,” he said. “We need to be able to look at what we are asking them to do and what's preventing them from being able to be productive.”\n\nDayton noted that Southwest, which established a relationship with GitLab in 2019, is focused on creating consistency for its software development processes. In part, that means moving code into a shared GitLab repository. By knowing where all of their code resides, teams will be able to more easily evaluate metrics, and begin to look at creating efficiencies by reusing code. \n\n“We’re also in the process of getting our enterprise pipelines finalized and we’re ready to start migrating teams onto them,” said Dayton. “We're collaborating heavily with a lot of different application development teams to understand what they need in the pipelines that we're building and we’re getting ready to start migrating teams onto them. I think we'll be getting pretty close by the end of the year.”\n\n### The promise of AI\n\nUsing artificial intelligence is one of the ways to enable developers to focus on bigger, more innovative tasks, Dayton explained.\n\nGenerative AI, whether in the form of vulnerability explainers, code suggestions, or code completion, has the ability to dramatically affect workflows across the entire software development lifecycle. Leveraging AI tools built into a platform can increase security and decrease time spent on code reviews and application development.\n\nDayton is looking forward to being able to use AI features to speed and ease development and deployment.\n\n“We want to get the mundane and the bureaucratic out of their way as much as possible,” Dayton said, adding that while there’s a lot of hype around AI, there’s also a lot of promise. “Using AI could do that. I think a great example will be when it can provide a solution to a vulnerability that was just identified or when it can tell us what a piece of code is doing. What is it integrating with? What data is it accessing and why? Tell me in plain English, for example, that this particular set of coding has been responsible for 20% of the incidents in this application over the past year. That’s where I think AI can help.”\n\nDayton noted that he doesn’t believe AI will replace developers. Instead, it should make their jobs easier. Another way AI can help is by connecting developers in a time when many are working remotely post-COVID.\n\n“One of the cool things that's in [GitLab’s] roadmap is Suggested Reviewers,” he said. “Getting help with code reviews used to involve yelling across the room or over a cube wall, ‘Hey, can someone look at my code?’ That’s not so easy now. AI can suggest someone who's actually worked in that code before or who has resolved incidents in that code and does that sort of thing. How much value is that going to add to the review process? I think the more automation we can put in, the less manual steps or wait states there will be.”\n\n\u003C!-- blank line -->\n\u003Cfigure class=\"video_container\">\n  \u003Ciframe src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/UnUfp7pKnEQ?si=qcX2Qm3zpgQOV4xy\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"true\"> \u003C/iframe>\n\u003C/figure>\n\u003C!-- blank line -->\n\n*Southwest Airlines is a nearly $24 billion company based in Dallas, Texas. With 72,000 employees, it flies to 120 destinations, making 4,000 flights per day.  Southwest flies more domestic passengers than any other airline.\nRead more GitLab customer stories on our [customers page](https://about.gitlab.com/customers/).*\n",[786,787,788,681],"DevOps","DevOps platform","AI/ML",{"slug":790,"featured":6,"template":684},"southwest-looking-to-help-developers-take-flight","content:en-us:blog:southwest-looking-to-help-developers-take-flight.yml","Southwest Looking To Help Developers Take Flight","en-us/blog/southwest-looking-to-help-developers-take-flight.yml","en-us/blog/southwest-looking-to-help-developers-take-flight",{"_path":796,"_dir":245,"_draft":6,"_partial":6,"_locale":7,"seo":797,"content":803,"config":809,"_id":811,"_type":16,"title":812,"_source":17,"_file":813,"_stem":814,"_extension":20},"/en-us/blog/u-s-navy-black-pearl-lessons-in-championing-devsecops",{"title":798,"description":799,"ogTitle":798,"ogDescription":799,"noIndex":6,"ogImage":800,"ogUrl":801,"ogSiteName":670,"ogType":671,"canonicalUrls":801,"schema":802},"U.S. Navy Black Pearl: Lessons in championing DevSecOps","Sigma Defense built a managed service software factory environment for the military using GitLab as its DevSecOps platform. Here's what they learned.","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749658924/Blog/Hero%20Images/securitylifecycle-light.png","https://about.gitlab.com/blog/u-s-navy-black-pearl-lessons-in-championing-devsecops","\n                        {\n        \"@context\": \"https://schema.org\",\n        \"@type\": \"Article\",\n        \"headline\": \"U.S. Navy Black Pearl: Lessons in championing DevSecOps\",\n        \"author\": [{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"name\":\"Sandra Gittlen\"}],\n        \"datePublished\": \"2023-12-12\",\n      }",{"title":798,"description":799,"authors":804,"heroImage":800,"date":806,"body":807,"category":14,"tags":808},[805],"Sandra Gittlen","2023-12-12","Manuel Gauto, director of engineering at government contractor [Sigma Defense](https://sigmadefense.com/), is a true DevSecOps champion. As co-creator of Black Pearl, a DevSecOps environment Sigma Defense manages for the U.S. Navy, Gauto witnesses firsthand the power that combining development, security, and operations can have in modernizing and scaling software development.\n\n\"If a DevSecOps environment is done correctly - where the tooling, security and compliance, connectivity, and onboarding are all handled as part of the platform – then mission owners can focus on mastering CI/CD in the context of their mission,\" Gauto said.\n\nGauto participated in GitLab's DevSecOps World Tour in Washington, D.C., speaking with GitLab Federal CTO Joel Krooswyk about Black Pearl and how consolidating a multitude of software factories into a single managed DevSecOps cloud environment has yielded tremendous results at scale, including:\n\n- a reduction in software factory setup time from around 6 months to 3 to 5 days\n- a 10x lower cost, decreasing from around $4 million to around $400,000\n- a more secure environment because there is inherent security with Authorization to Operate (ATO)\n- faster onboarding, decreasing from as long as 5 weeks to 1 day\n\n## The origins of Black Pearl\n\nA few years ago, the Navy had numerous software factories operating concurrently. Gauto himself was involved in standing a few of them up. \"We realized that it wasn't the most efficient approach – duplicative infrastructure in four or five different places that was ultimately doing the same thing,\" he said. \n\nThe team pitched the idea of a single environment that would consolidate cloud infrastructure, address security issues, and provide connectivity. That single environment was named \"Black Pearl\" and now consists of two offerings: Lighthouse, a DevSecOps infrastructure as code/configuration as code (IaC/CaC) baseline, and Party Barge, a managed shared offering.\n\nBlack Pearl’s common software environment with ATO provides commoditized DevSecOps tooling, pipeline component templates, governance/management, logging and metrics, integration infrastructure, cloud automation, and compute resources. The GitLab DevSecOps Platform is a major part of Black Pearl, providing \"a one-stop shop\" for source code management, tasks, documentation, and security scanning. Gauto said the dashboards and visualization are particularly integral to go/no-go decisions on shipping software.\n\n\"GitLab is the kind of platform that really enables us because it is the first time, even internally with our development, that we don't have to jump around to a bunch of different tools – we can just do everything in GitLab,\" he said. \"Having everyone on one platform also enables collaborative efficiency.\"\n\nGitLab's capabilities support the fast, secure, and cost-effective standup of software factories, according to Gauto.\n\n> Want to learn more about GitLab for the public sector? [Contact us today](https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/public-sector/).\n\n## How to build a strong DevSecOps environment\n\nIn the years since Black Pearl was first launched, Gauto has learned a lot about what makes a robust and secure DevSecOps environment. He said it comes down to tearing down silos and establishing a development ecosystem, centralizing security and compliance, providing the\nability to easily and quickly onboard talent, and remaining flexible and open to innovation. \n\n### Establish a strong development ecosystem\n\nIn large organizations, especially within government agencies, software development tends to break into silos. \"You'll have units of innovation that struggle to collaborate because they may work in one environment or in one building,\" Gauto said, adding that sharing anything – code, best practices, tooling, or infrastructure – can be challenging.\n\n\"By creating a well-established, well-maintained deployment of tooling, in particular, with GitLab, people can see what other teams are doing and share more readily,\" he said. \"Instead of mailing a CD to some lab somewhere else in the country, DevSecOps teams can just say, 'Let me add you as a developer on my project and you can kick around these repositories.'\" \n\nAn ecosystem helps aggregate demand in a way that breaks down barriers to infrastructure accreditation. \"We can go to the cyber community or certification community and say, 'I'm here representing a large group of users. This is a pain point we all have and we would like to work with you to figure it out,'\" Gauto said. For example, allowing people to connect to Black Pearl over the internet from a contractor machine, government machine, or wherever. \"It should not be this difficult in an unclassified environment.\"\n\nWith a strong ecosystem, you also can build up your best practices and processes around planning (such as Agile, Scrum, and Kanban), integrating on-site and remote development, gaining authorization for software, and delivering applications to various environments.\n\n### Apply security and compliance\n\nWhen it comes to security and compliance, Gauto said the biggest thing is to be able to see the train coming down the tracks and to be as prepared as possible. \"Let's not be surprised and let's not be standing on the tracks when it gets here,\" he said. \n\nOne area where that sentiment is wholly applicable is compliance, where mandates are evolving at breakneck speed. \"We want to be prepared to provide the data and the tooling in a format that's ingestible by the right people,\" he said.\n\nHe credits GitLab for helping with this challenge. \"GitLab Ultimate lets us just bake compliance in from the start and template a bunch of stuff from the start,\" which lets customers immediately start running with compliance, he said.\n\nGitLab also supports licensing and ATO scans in a single platform. \n\n### Support rapid onboarding of talent\n\nAcross the military, there are obstacles to accessing the best DevSecOps talent, including working in buildings with no windows, and having to jump through giant hoops to be able to work on classified networks.\n\n\"I think that really limits the talent that can be brought to the table to solve some of the really hard problems we have,\" Gauto said. For Black Pearl to be successful\nin supporting the missions, it was imperative to \"enable broader access to talent and then build sustainable onboarding workflows.\"\n\nWithin the DoD, there are a lot of difficult and interesting problems that need to be solved but the\nability to collaborate across government, industry, and academia can be a limiting factor. \"There are a large number of locations where software development is being done and without a common environment to work within, work can be repeated, lost, or otherwise underutilized,\" Gauto said.\n\nBlack Pearl provides an environment for different organizations to collaborate in a way that is accessible. Black Pearl has focused on ensuring that authorized users are able to access the environment from different devices, networks, and locations without onerous access procedures. This approach fosters the development of new ideas and increases the speed to new capabilities.\n\n### Enable flexibility and innovation\n\nThe military has so many different delivery environments – from submarines to aircraft carriers – that Black Pearl has to be incredibly flexible. \"We enable everyone to manage their own kingdom and focus their efforts on pieces that are specific to their problem space,\" Gauto said. \"We know there's not one pipeline to rule all. So we provide the toolkit and let everyone tailor the solution to what they need instead of saying, 'you have to do software development this way and you have to deliver it this way.'\"\n\nBlack Pearl encourages customers to have a sense of ownership over their environments, using the building blocks of GitLab Ultimate, including CI/CD pipelines, scanning, and testing. \"We want them to get to the point where they are ready to use all the tools that we offer,\" Gauto said. They also educate the customer so that the customer can drive their own requirements rather than Black Pearl having to pitch functionality to them.\n\nFor example, the Black Pearl team closely collaborates with the developer team for The Forge, a software factory for the Navy's Aegis integrated weapons system. \"One day The Forge team said, 'We feel like we should be scanning our source code for secrets before we check it in.' Exactly.\"\n\nHe also wants to be careful to not stifle innovation or overly restrict customers. \"Not everything is a containerized business application that goes to the cloud,\" he said. He instructs his team members to \"make sure we have a strategy for providing flexibility for people that are doing something weird, because the people that are doing something weird are usually doing something cool.\" \n\nArtificial intelligence and machine learning will be a test of this philosophy. \"There are going to be some novel tools and some novel data classifications that we are going to have to iterate on quickly,\" he said.\n\n## The proven thesis\n\nGauto is proud of Black Pearl's tremendous adoption rates, which have grown 400% over the past 12 months, and believes it is proof of the concept. \"The Black Pearl thesis of a managed service that enables people to quickly start solving their own problems without worrying about the 'boring' stuff can work and is valuable,\" he said.\n\n> Learn more about [GitLab for the public sector](https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/public-sector/).\n",[703,480,746,268,185],{"slug":810,"featured":92,"template":684},"u-s-navy-black-pearl-lessons-in-championing-devsecops","content:en-us:blog:u-s-navy-black-pearl-lessons-in-championing-devsecops.yml","U S Navy Black Pearl Lessons In Championing Devsecops","en-us/blog/u-s-navy-black-pearl-lessons-in-championing-devsecops.yml","en-us/blog/u-s-navy-black-pearl-lessons-in-championing-devsecops",{"_path":816,"_dir":245,"_draft":6,"_partial":6,"_locale":7,"seo":817,"content":823,"config":828,"_id":830,"_type":16,"title":831,"_source":17,"_file":832,"_stem":833,"_extension":20},"/en-us/blog/betstudios-cto-on-improving-ci-cd-capabilities-with-gitlab-premium",{"title":818,"description":819,"ogTitle":818,"ogDescription":819,"noIndex":6,"ogImage":820,"ogUrl":821,"ogSiteName":670,"ogType":671,"canonicalUrls":821,"schema":822},"Betstudios CTO on improving CI/CD capabilities with GitLab Premium","Read why Betstudios upgraded to GitLab Premium and how their software development process has changed in this Q&A with their CTO Rafael Campuzano.","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749663000/Blog/Hero%20Images/tanukilifecycle.png","https://about.gitlab.com/blog/betstudios-cto-on-improving-ci-cd-capabilities-with-gitlab-premium","\n                        {\n        \"@context\": \"https://schema.org\",\n        \"@type\": \"Article\",\n        \"headline\": \"Betstudios CTO on improving CI/CD capabilities with GitLab Premium\",\n        \"author\": [{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"name\":\"Kristina Weis\"}],\n        \"datePublished\": \"2023-12-06\",\n      }",{"title":818,"description":819,"authors":824,"heroImage":820,"date":825,"body":826,"category":14,"tags":827},[763],"2023-12-06","Since joining [Betstudios](https://betstudios.com/en/) (soon to be part of WA. Technology Group) as their CTO earlier this year, Rafael Campuzano has been focused on finding ways to help the software development team save time, automate manual processes, and have a better experience.\n\nThe team had been using GitLab’s free tier for source code management and version control for several years, but they wanted to improve their CI/CD capabilities so they made the decision to upgrade to GitLab Premium. We talked with Rafael about what the team has already been able to do, how their software development process has changed, and what they’re planning to do next.\n\n__What led you to upgrade from GitLab’s free tier to GitLab Premium?__\n\nThe main motivation when I joined Betstudios was to have the service hosted outside our office servers and remove the hassle of having to manage it ourselves, so we decided to move to the SaaS model. Once that decision was made, we needed a certain level of reliability but mainly we wanted to improve our [CI/CD capabilities](https://about.gitlab.com/topics/ci-cd/), which was the reason for upgrading to the Premium plan.\n\n__What made you choose GitLab?__\n\nBetstudios was already using GitLab and I had experience from previous companies and knew that GitLab is a quite complete tool for managing code and beyond. Besides, I also liked the openness and the overall culture of the company, based on transparency and innovation.\n\n__How has your software development process changed since adopting GitLab Premium?__\n\nWe’re a small team and haven’t been able to take full advantage of all the power that GitLab Premium brings yet, but we’ve started with some deployment automations and that’s taken away a lot of unnecessary work — and mistakes — from the teams.\n\n__What benefits have you seen since you started using GitLab Premium?__\n\nWe’re just getting started, but we have already saved around five hours per week per Team Lead by automating much of the deployment process, and soon we expect to take that to 10 hours per week of time saved. Now they can dedicate this time to better planning, code reviews, and even coding.\n\n__You also moved from GitLab's free tier to GitLab Premium at your last company. How did that experience affect your decision to upgrade to GitLab Premium at Betstudios?__\n\nI was responsible for infrastructure at [EveryMatrix](https://about.gitlab.com/customers/everymatrix/), which included the support of the GitLab servers on-prem. We needed HA (high availability), so we decided to move to the Premium plan. However, we soon realized we made many development teams happy, because they wanted to use the more advanced features that the Premium plan was coming with. The development teams showed it was a great decision for them, and our relationship with GitLab the company was always great, so when I arrived at Betstudios it was a clear move to make.\n\n__What would you like to do next with GitLab’s DevSecOps Platform?__\n\nI would like to explore the CI/CD capabilities with Kubernetes, and I’m encouraging our Engineering teams to use all the capabilities like code reviews, advanced merge requests, and CI/CD more and more. I’ve also seen that many companies are using ArgoCD in combination with GitLab and I’m going to explore if there is a way to do everything just using GitLab.\n\n__Do you have any advice for teams getting started with GitLab?__\n\nIt is an all-in-one platform, so you do not need to build complex systems for different tasks around your code production, methodologies, and operations. GitLab is easy to use and has a great team that will help you to get the most out of it.\n\n> Read more GitLab customer stories on our [customers page](https://about.gitlab.com/customers/).",[703,480,110,681],{"slug":829,"featured":6,"template":684},"betstudios-cto-on-improving-ci-cd-capabilities-with-gitlab-premium","content:en-us:blog:betstudios-cto-on-improving-ci-cd-capabilities-with-gitlab-premium.yml","Betstudios Cto On Improving Ci Cd Capabilities With Gitlab Premium","en-us/blog/betstudios-cto-on-improving-ci-cd-capabilities-with-gitlab-premium.yml","en-us/blog/betstudios-cto-on-improving-ci-cd-capabilities-with-gitlab-premium",{"_path":835,"_dir":245,"_draft":6,"_partial":6,"_locale":7,"seo":836,"content":842,"config":847,"_id":849,"_type":16,"title":850,"_source":17,"_file":851,"_stem":852,"_extension":20},"/en-us/blog/dunelm-strengthens-business-by-enhancing-its-devsecops-culture",{"title":837,"description":838,"ogTitle":837,"ogDescription":838,"noIndex":6,"ogImage":839,"ogUrl":840,"ogSiteName":670,"ogType":671,"canonicalUrls":840,"schema":841},"Dunelm strengthens business by enhancing its DevSecOps culture","Learn how a major UK retailer is using GitLab to ensure everyone in their DevSecOps teams can work together, increasing speed, security, and trust.","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749670332/Blog/Hero%20Images/groupcollaboration.jpg","https://about.gitlab.com/blog/dunelm-strengthens-business-by-enhancing-its-devsecops-culture","\n                        {\n        \"@context\": \"https://schema.org\",\n        \"@type\": \"Article\",\n        \"headline\": \"Dunelm strengthens business by enhancing its DevSecOps culture\",\n        \"author\": [{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"name\":\"Sharon Gaudin\"}],\n        \"datePublished\": \"2023-11-16\",\n      }",{"title":837,"description":838,"authors":843,"heroImage":839,"date":844,"body":845,"category":14,"tags":846},[699],"2023-11-16","When IT leaders at one of the UK’s largest retailers wanted to better support and strengthen the business, they created a culture where everyone on their DevSecOps teams could work together more naturally.\n\n“DevSecOps is a mindset and mindset is a cultural thing,” said Paul Kerrison, director of Engineering and Architecture at [Dunelm](https://about.gitlab.com/customers/dunelm/), a $1.6 billion (GBP) British home furnishings retailer. “Culture isn’t just a buzzword or something nice to have. There's a genuine value. It builds trust with not just the technology teams but with the wider business as a whole. That allows us to move faster and more safely.”\n\nKerrison, along with Jan Claeyssens, Dunelm’s DevSecOps principal engineer, talked about creating this cultural shift during GitLab’s DevSecOps World Tour event in London this fall. The 44-year-old company, which is traded on the London Stock Exchange and employs more than 11,000 people, adopted GitLab in 2020. They have been using the end-to-end platform to not only increase software development productivity and efficiency but to build inclusive teams that are focused on sharing responsibility for security.\n\nOn stage with Grigoriy Shlyapinkov, strategic customer success manager at GitLab, Claeyssens told the audience it’s been critical to cut out an us-versus-them mentality that existed between developers and security engineers. Working hard to break down those barriers, he said they’ve created a new [cohesive environment](/blog/its-time-to-put-the-sec-in-devsecops/).\n\nDunelm’s DevOps teams had been working together pretty well before the culture shift, but now they’re [collaborating](/blog/5-ways-collaboration-boosts-productivity-and-your-career/) on a different level.\n\n## Embedding security into the team\n\n“I think we can all agree that in 2023 you can no longer say you have good software if it isn't secure,” said Claeyssens. “We have to lean in and really listen to what problems other people are facing, and then figure out how to help them. We all work at Dunelm for the same thing – to [make the business better](/blog/how-devsecops-drives-business-success/). So we need to solve problems together and that’s going to be a continuous journey. This culture will require daily effort.”\n\nThat effort, though, is eased by using GitLab because everyone – from developers to security and the C-suite – can use the end-to-end platform to gain visibility into every project, Claeyssens noted.\n\n“With the platform we can serve all our users where they live,” he said. “It’s one of GitLab’s mantras. If you have everything in one place, all colleagues can see all the features, and in the end, that puts us on a journey together.” \n\n## Making room at the table\n\nKerrison said by rewarding positive behaviors and giving security team members a seat at what had once been an exclusive table, everyone can pick up the security mantle. \n\n“Including security in the leadership team and having them work closely with the engineering teams is key,” he said. “You can’t improve security if it's seen as a second-class citizen.”\n\nAnd part of making it easier for everyone to be aware of and work on security is about using automation features built into the GitLab platform, according to Claeyssens. “The platform is about automating security,” he said. “You have all the security scanners in GitLab – everything. We use the compliance frameworks. The vulnerability scanning. The scan result policies. It makes all our lives a little bit easier.”\n\nThat holistic approach to DevSecOps is what made Dunelm adopt GitLab in the first place. “GitLab sold us on the dream of the whole suite of features, and I'll be honest, I didn't know where GitHub was at the time,” said Claeyssens. “There were only so many contenders. That's how we ended up with GitLab.”\n\n## Looking ahead to working with AI\n\nWhen asked about using artificial intelligence-assisted tools to cut down on DevSecOps workloads, Kerrison said it’s really easy right now to get caught up in all the buzz about AI. Their work with it will likely start, he explained, with using AI for specific tasks, like code generation, vulnerability checks, and refactoring code. Then as it advances, the technology could start to give engineers real-time feedback on code as they’re writing it.\n\nReferencing Star Trek character Captain Jean-Luc Picard asking the starship’s food replicator for “tea, Earl Grey, hot,” Kerrison said he’s looking forward to the day he can order up microservice deliveries and the smart system will create automated testing, along with security and vulnerability scanning. \n\nWhat Kerrison’s really waiting for, though, are AI tools that have actual agency to be predictive, considering what projects and teams need assistance and then launching that work. “It would be much more trusted and can go out to find problems and fix them,” said Kerrison. “Then engineers can start to focus more on the what than the how. That’s where the power will be. Although until AI gets to the place where it can sort and pair socks after they've been through the washing, I don't think we're quite there yet.”\n\n_Dunelm, which uses GitLab Ultimate, has distribution centers, 178 stores, and a robust ecommerce operation. The company sees more than 12 million online transactions per year, while maintaining a large online catalog. More than ever, Dunelm relies on innovative technology engineering to improve customer experiences._\n\n_Read more GitLab customer stories on our [customers page](https://about.gitlab.com/customers/)._",[681,703,480,746],{"slug":848,"featured":6,"template":684},"dunelm-strengthens-business-by-enhancing-its-devsecops-culture","content:en-us:blog:dunelm-strengthens-business-by-enhancing-its-devsecops-culture.yml","Dunelm Strengthens Business By Enhancing Its Devsecops Culture","en-us/blog/dunelm-strengthens-business-by-enhancing-its-devsecops-culture.yml","en-us/blog/dunelm-strengthens-business-by-enhancing-its-devsecops-culture",{"_path":854,"_dir":245,"_draft":6,"_partial":6,"_locale":7,"seo":855,"content":861,"config":866,"_id":868,"_type":16,"title":869,"_source":17,"_file":870,"_stem":871,"_extension":20},"/en-us/blog/why-hackerone-gets-love-letters-from-developers",{"title":856,"description":857,"ogTitle":856,"ogDescription":857,"noIndex":6,"ogImage":858,"ogUrl":859,"ogSiteName":670,"ogType":671,"canonicalUrls":859,"schema":860},"Why HackerOne gets love letters from its developers","Learn how HackerOne is making developers more productive while ensuring that security is built into their software development processes.","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749662439/Blog/Hero%20Images/codewithheart.png","https://about.gitlab.com/blog/why-hackerone-gets-love-letters-from-developers","\n                        {\n        \"@context\": \"https://schema.org\",\n        \"@type\": \"Article\",\n        \"headline\": \"Why HackerOne gets love letters from its developers\",\n        \"author\": [{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"name\":\"Sharon Gaudin\"}],\n        \"datePublished\": \"2023-11-14\",\n      }",{"title":856,"description":857,"authors":862,"heroImage":858,"date":863,"body":864,"category":14,"tags":865},[699],"2023-11-14","At [HackerOne](/customers/hackerone/), a cybersecurity company, using the GitLab DevSecOps Platform has changed developers’ team experience and culture so much they’re basically sending the company love letters about their jobs.\n\nThis is no exaggeration, according to HackerOne Senior Director of Platform and Infrastructure Russell Owen, who spoke to an audience at GitLab’s DevSecOps World Tour in Mountain View, California, this fall. The 11-year-old company adopted GitLab in 2018 for source code and issues management, CI/CD, and security and compliance – features that didn’t exist in its previous tooling system. Since then, developers have become more productive — and happier.\n\nHackerOne isn’t alone here. According to GitLab’s [2023 Global DevSecOps Survey](https://about.gitlab.com/developer-survey/previous/2023/), 28% of the more than 5,000 respondents said using DevOps made their developers happier. Productivity, efficiency, and automation go a long way to making developers’ jobs easier and more enjoyable. \n\n## Measuring for DevSecOps impact\n\n“We run surveys every quarter. Are the developers happy? What do they find frustrating? Where's the friction?” Owen said in an on-stage interview with [Sherrod Patching](https://about.gitlab.com/company/team/#spatching), vice president of customer success management at GitLab. “We compare our metrics across the industry to see how we're doing.”\n\nAnd they’re doing well. “For instance, just making our [CI/CD pipelines](/blog/how-to-learn-ci-cd-fast/) as tight as possible makes people more effective. We've done a lot of work on optimizing that inside of GitLab,” Owen added. “And we get what count as love letters from our developers. People are so excited because the pipeline times have come down substantially, and it has a direct impact on the productivity of the team.”\n\nWhile Owen said he definitely wants his DevSecOps team members to be happy, he also wants productivity to be high. And he noted the importance of evaluating a variety of metrics — from happiness to the number of merge requests and releases — to enable teams to quantify their impact on the company. And those numbers are good, too.\n\nWith GitLab, merge requests per engineer are up by 50% over the last year, and they’ve cut their code release time by 50% over the last two years, according to Owen, who added that the number of quarterly releases to production jumped by 73% since two years ago.\n\n“A lot of that is from just shaving time off the CI/CD pipeline,” he said. “That’s efficiency. That’s productivity. It’s important because I need to be able to justify our work and expenses. These kinds of metrics make it very easy for me to say: ‘Investing in this area has a measurable return on investment.’”\n\n## Using GitLab for security and compliance\n\nWhen a business is known around the world for cybersecurity, assuring the safety and reliability of its own code has to be a priority. HackerOne uses GitLab to ensure that security is built into their software products and processes, according to Owen.\n\nHe explained their need, for example, to keep the number of people who have access to their production systems to a minimum. The fewer people who can touch the system, the fewer potential entry points to introduce vulnerabilities. The platform enables the team to build in guidelines mandating that any change needs to be reviewed and approved by the infrastructure team. So when teams make a change to the infrastructure, it’s only applied to the system once it’s been accepted. \n\n“Changes are being reviewed by people who have expertise in the area,” said Owen. “This really allows efficiency, but also maintains security. And it's all done inside GitLab.”\n\nHackerOne also relies on the GitLab platform to make sure they are staying in line with strict [industry compliance requirements](/blog/meet-regulatory-standards-with-gitlab/). Limiting the number of people who have access to the system is an example of that.\n\nOwen said they also use GitLab to [stay compliant](/blog/top-5-compliance-features-to-leverage-in-gitlab/) with FedRAMP, the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, a set of standards the U.S. federal government requires for moving sensitive information into the cloud. \n\n“We do more and more work with containers and FedRAMP requires that they be scanned before being moved into production,” he added. “You can’t just bring them into your infrastructure directly. We stage and scan everything in GitLab — all the containers, particularly third-party containers. Then, if they meet our criteria, we move them on so they’re eligible for production.”\n\nWith GitLab, HackerOne remains FedRAMP compliant for all of its federal customers.  \n\n## Looking to an AI future\n\nWhen asked what he thought they’d be focused on over the next five years, Owen replied, “AI, AI, AI.”\n\nFor HackerOne, which brings in immense amounts of data, Owen said he’s looking to artificial intelligence to help them cull that flood of information to find patterns and pull out what will be useful to their customers.\n\n“Whatever business you're in, for a long time, there has been a lot of data,” Owen said. “And you can't help but wonder how you can use it to provide value to your customers, right? There has been a sea change in the last few years, from AI being something that was kind of theoretically interesting to something that is operationally useful. So if you're not doing AI... Well, I'm sure we’re all doing AI. You have to do it now. And the tools are just incredible.”\n\n_HackerOne’s Owen is a software developer, designer, and IT leader with more than 20 years of experience building advanced systems. He previously worked at Google as an engineering manager in the company’s privacy and security department, as well as at Research in Motion, where he was responsible for the Blackberry’s infrastructure design._\n\n_Read more GitLab customer stories on our [customers page](https://about.gitlab.com/customers/)._",[703,480,788,681],{"slug":867,"featured":92,"template":684},"why-hackerone-gets-love-letters-from-developers","content:en-us:blog:why-hackerone-gets-love-letters-from-developers.yml","Why Hackerone Gets Love Letters From Developers","en-us/blog/why-hackerone-gets-love-letters-from-developers.yml","en-us/blog/why-hackerone-gets-love-letters-from-developers",{"_path":873,"_dir":245,"_draft":6,"_partial":6,"_locale":7,"seo":874,"content":880,"config":886,"_id":888,"_type":16,"title":889,"_source":17,"_file":890,"_stem":891,"_extension":20},"/en-us/blog/lendlease-driving-change-with-gitlab",{"title":875,"description":876,"ogTitle":875,"ogDescription":876,"noIndex":6,"ogImage":877,"ogUrl":878,"ogSiteName":670,"ogType":671,"canonicalUrls":878,"schema":879},"How global real estate company Lendlease is driving change with GitLab","Learn how Lendlease is using GitLab to improve visibility, foster collaboration, and empower everyone to be responsible for security.","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749670317/Blog/Hero%20Images/blog-banner-blue-neon.png","https://about.gitlab.com/blog/lendlease-driving-change-with-gitlab","\n                        {\n        \"@context\": \"https://schema.org\",\n        \"@type\": \"Article\",\n        \"headline\": \"How global real estate company Lendlease is driving change with GitLab\",\n        \"author\": [{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"name\":\"Sharon Gaudin\"}],\n        \"datePublished\": \"2023-10-23\",\n      }",{"title":875,"description":876,"authors":881,"heroImage":877,"date":882,"body":883,"category":14,"tags":884},[699],"2023-10-23","\n\nWhen Lendlease, a $6 billion (AUD) multinational real estate company, needed to facilitate a culture change in their software development teams, they turned to GitLab and its DevSecOps platform.\n\nThat’s the message Ciaran Hennessy, chief software architect for Lendlease Digital, a business unit of Lendlease, shared in an on-stage interview at the Melbourne, Australia, stop of [GitLab’s DevSecOps World Tour](https://about.gitlab.com/events/devsecops-world-tour/). By beginning to eliminate a complicated toolchain with an end-to-end platform, the Sydney-based organization has been able to fuel collaboration, increase visibility, and make everyone responsible for security.\n\n“We were breaking the old models of culture and teams,” said Hennessy, a self-described “uber nerd” with 23 years of experience in the tech industry. “Especially after COVID permanently transformed the working environment, we needed to create cohesion in teams when you can't have them all in the same room. And that gave us the opportunity to make other changes to the way we handle security, visibility, and managing our legacy technology.”\n\nIn an interview with Craig Nielsen, vice president of enterprise sales at GitLab, Hennessy also talked about pushing legacy technology into pipelines, and how he expects generative artificial intelligence (AI) will come into play.\n\nLet’s jump into what Hennessy had to say.\n\n## Gaining “radical visibility”\n\nWhen the COVID pandemic pushed businesses toward hybrid work structures, Lendlease saw it as the perfect time to change the way people not only get their jobs done but how they see their role and responsibilities inside a DevOps team, according to Hennessy. The challenge was to figure out how to give everyone from executives to coders and security specialists visibility into how projects were progressing, where stumbling blocks were popping up, and what solutions worked best.\n\nUsing a single platform gave them what Hennessy called “radical visibility.”\n\n“We have no walls between our teams anymore,” he told the DevSecOp World Tour audience. “Everybody can see everything. We’re empowering people to look at everything and learn about other parts of a project. It enables people to say, ‘Oh, I also had that problem. Let me help you solve that.’ And people aren’t spending their time asking, ‘Does anybody know where this code is?’ or ‘Does anybody know who worked on this last time?’ Everybody can track all of the work.”\n\nHennessy called this level of visibility a “game changer” for Lendlease.\n\n## Fostering collaboration\n\nWith that transparency into projects and workflows, it simply was much easier and more natural for teams to work together. And since the company’s software development organization is spread from Australia to Singapore, the U.S., and the U.K., team members needed a way to work together that went beyond instant messaging and phone calls. \n\n“We gained shared knowledge and context,” said Hennessy. “The platform enabled people to contribute to what others were working on and it means an individual is able to produce more easily what they need to.”\n\nHe added that being able to see what’s happening with a project from start to finish enables managers to act as mentors and teachers, guiding DevOps workers and helping them learn new ways to do their jobs. “I tell people that visibility doesn’t mean you’re the cop,” he added. “You’re the ones sitting on the edge cheering everybody on to do a good job. With a single platform, you’re creating those opportunities. This is where GitLab is really useful.”\n\n## Sharing security responsibility\n\nWhen Lendlease was considering adopting GitLab, a big part of the attraction was the fact that security was “baked into” the app, said Hennessy. With the GitLab DevSecOps Platform, security is pushed left, meaning developers start thinking about security when they begin planning new features or projects. And everyone can participate in securing code, so features or products aren’t left to only be tested right before production, stalling work and slowing releases.\n\n“Security is not an afterthought. It's part of the culture that we brought in,” said Hennessy. “Security is not useful in your software development process unless everybody is a security person. Everyone is responsible for security and with a platform that works.”\n\nHe noted that before using a platform, a developer might spot a vulnerability in his code but not fix it because he figured someone at the end of the process would deal with it. “Now, with the shift left, nobody is intentionally letting a security vulnerability go through into their product,” said Hennessy. “Someone might have created 20 vulnerabilities in their code, but it's fine because they were aware and acted responsibly, so the flaws never got through into a working environment.”\n\n## Adapting for the future \n\nA 65-year-old company, Lendlease has decades worth of legacy code. One challenge with that is some junior developers may not have experience working with older programming languages. However, it can still play a valuable role in the tech ecosystem. By taking a thoughtful and strategic approach to integrating legacy tech, the business is able to leverage its full technological capabilities while also prioritizing the needs of teams and stakeholders.\n\nSo how will they update or integrate this older tech? \n\n“There is so much value companies have invested in classic technology,” Hennessy explained. “We had applications running that no one had touched for 15 years. It's really hard to get people to work on that stuff because it's not cool and exciting. Try and give a mainframe application written in Modula-2 to a 23-year-old developer just out of university and see what happens.”\n\nHowever, using GitLab’s platform, Hennessy’s teams push legacy code into pipelines and containerize it. By creating container images that mimic the company’s current environments and dependencies, new developers can use that to work on and test the applications, applying new methodologies and best practices. \n\n“Good code never dies. It just becomes legacy,” said Hennessy. “We gave it new value.”\n\n## Adding muscle with generative AI\n\nHennessy is welcoming of generative AI, noting that he’s not really concerned about the technology replacing software developers’ jobs. He does, however, wonder how it will affect how, and how much, coders learn. \n\n“The bit I'm worried about is the loss of the foundational skills that good software developers have,” he explained. “AI will provide a lot of acceleration to get them past the things they might need to learn through time and experience, and doing stupid things and working through it. We could have a generation of software developers who know how to do all the top-layer stuff but they won’t know the foundational things of how it all works.”\n\nDespite those concerns, Hennessy told the Melbourne audience he expects using generative AI will be like adding extra hands to his DevSecOps teams. \n\n“The thing I find really interesting about it is you get a resource that you can use to help you create new value,” he said. “I’m really interested in how we can use it to massively accelerate creation.”\n\n_Lendlease is a globally integrated real estate group. Its core capabilities are reflected in three operating segments — investments, development, and construction. The combination provides them with the ability to deliver innovative integrated solutions for its customers._\n\n_Read more GitLab customer stories on our [customers page](https://about.gitlab.com/customers/)._\n",[681,885,746],"collaboration",{"slug":887,"featured":6,"template":684},"lendlease-driving-change-with-gitlab","content:en-us:blog:lendlease-driving-change-with-gitlab.yml","Lendlease Driving Change With Gitlab","en-us/blog/lendlease-driving-change-with-gitlab.yml","en-us/blog/lendlease-driving-change-with-gitlab",{"_path":893,"_dir":245,"_draft":6,"_partial":6,"_locale":7,"seo":894,"content":900,"config":905,"_id":907,"_type":16,"title":908,"_source":17,"_file":909,"_stem":910,"_extension":20},"/en-us/blog/six-reasons-cisco-learning-and-certifications-adopted-gitlab",{"title":895,"description":896,"ogTitle":895,"ogDescription":896,"noIndex":6,"ogImage":897,"ogUrl":898,"ogSiteName":670,"ogType":671,"canonicalUrls":898,"schema":899},"6 reasons Cisco Learning and Certifications adopted GitLab","Learn what Cisco Learning and Certifications's principal engineer and lead architect shared about the organization's use of GitLab at our DevSecOps World Tour in Chicago.","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749670302/Blog/Hero%20Images/lightbulb-book.png","https://about.gitlab.com/blog/six-reasons-cisco-learning-and-certifications-adopted-gitlab","\n                        {\n        \"@context\": \"https://schema.org\",\n        \"@type\": \"Article\",\n        \"headline\": \"6 reasons Cisco Learning and Certifications adopted GitLab\",\n        \"author\": [{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"name\":\"Sharon Gaudin\"}],\n        \"datePublished\": \"2023-09-05\",\n      }",{"title":895,"description":896,"authors":901,"heroImage":897,"date":902,"body":903,"category":14,"tags":904},[699],"2023-09-05","\nAfter adopting the GitLab DevSecOps Platform, the learning and certification arm of tech giant Cisco Systems, Inc. saw its toolchain shrink and was able to offer its entire software development team a way to improve collaboration and accelerate production.\n\nThat’s part of the story that Hank Preston, principal engineer and lead architect with [Cisco Learning and Certifications](https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/training-events/training-certifications.html), shared in an on-stage interview at the Chicago stop of [GitLab’s DevSecOps World Tour](https://about.gitlab.com/events/devsecops-world-tour/).\n\nPreston also spent part of his conversation with Nico Ochoa, senior major account executive at GitLab, talking about the rapid rise in interest in AI and how that is likely to affect everything from how they create software to how newer developers learn to code.\n\nHere are some of the opportunities Cisco Learning and Certifications is gaining from using GitLab:  \n \n## 1. Getting a handle on version control\nPreston said one of the biggest challenges he was looking to overcome by adopting a DevSecOps platform was resolving and [preventing conflicts](/topics/version-control/how-implement-version-control/) they had keeping track of code modifications and version updates, which can be easy to lose sight of when handling them manually. For example, the team had been storing templates and configuration pieces in different places and ended up having an “extreme inability” to know what had been changed and where it went, he said. Using a platform gives the team a way to more easily and clearly manage source and version controls. “It gave us a way to actually keep everything in one place, and understand the trajectory and history of changes,” he said.\n\n## 2. Ensuring accountability\n“Gaining accountability was a big one for us,” Preston told the audience. “We needed to know when something changed, who changed it, and who approved that change.” In an efficient, high-performing DevSecOps team, this kind of transparent accountability is critical. Both the development and operations teams have an equal stake in DevSecOps success. The problem is that it can be difficult to do when team structures and responsibilities are outdated or haven’t been updated in documentation. Clearly distributing functions and noting who needs to do a task, as well as when and who accomplished a task, makes this work. “When I taught a bunch of network engineers how to do merge requests and branching, it became less of a challenge for us,” Preston said. \n\n## 3. Consolidating their toolchain\n“[Reducing our toolchain](/blog/too-many-toolchains-a-devops-platform-migration-is-the-answer/) … that was one of the reasons we selected GitLab. I didn't want to have to have a source control tool and a CI tool and an issues tool,” Preston said.\n\nCisco Learning and Certifications still uses Jira — a decision Preston said was not his own. “I'm looking forward to potentially getting rid of [Jira] in the future. But not having to manage a bunch of tools was a big value for us because then there are less things to integrate, less things to upgrade, and less things I have to train people on how to use,” he added.\n\n## 4. Boosting collaboration \nWhen different team members want to [collaborate](/blog/5-ways-collaboration-boosts-productivity-and-your-career/) on a project, sharing responsibilities and information, it’s critical for them to be able to all work in the same place. Preston explained that having a single, end-to-end platform that everyone works in means teammates don’t have to go looking for something across multiple tools. “Now everybody knows where to go to find the code and the templates they need. And the automation pieces are right there,” he added. “We don’t need to go looking for things or logging into, say, Mark's particular OneDrive folder to find a piece we need.” \n\n## 5. Having a single source of truth\n“I'm a big proponent of the concept of a single source of truth,” said Preston. “I tell people that the network shouldn't be the source of truth. That's the implementation of what our source of truth is.”\n\nCisco Learning and Certifications uses GitLab as the source of truth for a lot of its configuration templates, automation scripts and jobs, and infrastructure as code, according to Preston. “So whether it’s our data centers or sites, all the data should be aggregated and stored according to a single reference point. We have a plan and a way of doing things and everyone can see what that is,” he said.\n\n## 6. Speeding up production\nPreston also noted he’s using the platform to gain insight into and improve the time it takes to move a software project from ideation to development and into deployment. “One of the metrics I'm trying to use with our team now is how long it takes us to get something from an idea to working software,” he said. “If I’m trying to get an update into production or if I'm trying to fix something on the infrastructure stack, how long does it take us to get to where we feel comfortable pushing it into production? That's a metric we're watching. I don't want it to take 18 months to go from an idea to release. I needed that to be much faster.”\n\n## How AI could affect software creation, developer learning\nDuring his on-stage talk, Preston also turned his attention to artificial intelligence (AI), speaking about the growing call for the use of [AI in DevSecOps](/blog/ai-assisted-code-suggestions/), how it may be regulated, and how it could affect software developers.\n\n“AI in DevOps has changed dramatically just over the last three months or so,” he said. “The [AI transition](/blog/extending-code-suggestions/) has been rapid. I can't even pretend to guess what the next two years of it will look like, let alone the next five years. I think it’s an interesting challenge, and, well, to be honest, it makes me personally nervous.”\n\nHe added that he’s concerned about the issue of intellectual property and who owns the code that AI generates. Will the software built by AI be owned by the company the code was built for, or by the person or company that created the AI?\n\n“The intellectual property question is a big one. It’s something that has to be figured out,” he said.\n\nAnother thing that nags at Preston is how using AI in DevSecOps will affect the way people learn to develop code if it’s automatically being generated for them. Will people still become coding wizards if they don’t actually have to do it themselves?\n\n“I think about how this will affect the path of software developers and engineers who are coming onto the team,” he said. “How will they become our coding experts in the future? I love the code generation process but it also makes me worried. I wonder — and part of me thinks I'm just being the grouchy old man — how do we teach the new engineers how to make a connection to MySQL if the minute they type ‘M-Y-S-Q-L,’ the code comes up? That’s a scary spot. I know there's a lot of value to the grunt work being thinned out, but there’s value that comes with the doing and learning.”\n\nAnswering a question about whether Cisco allows developers to use AI-generated code, Preston replied, “Generally, no.” He said executives need to work through intellectual property questions first, but AI is a tool they plan to implement.\n\nPreston also was asked about maintaining standards when using AI to generate code. “We're looking for AI solutions we can leverage that will meet the coding requirements we have across the board,” he said. “But I think the question on standards is important. It's going to be the same way we handle it when people write code. Code will all have to be checked against set standards, whether it’s written by people or AI.”\n\n_Preston’s team within Cisco Learning and Certifications is responsible for creating and maintaining the software needed for the digital learning platform that offers instant user access to training information, classes, course materials, and exam preparation resources. Cisco employees use the platform to gain certifications, like CCNA, CCMP, and CCIE._\n\n_GitLab’s DevSecOps World Tour was designed to enable everyone — from technology champions to executives and software development team members — to gather and learn about the ideas and technologies driving the DevSecOps transformation. Learn more about our [DevSecOps World Tour](https://about.gitlab.com/events/devsecops-world-tour/)._\n",[703,681,788],{"slug":906,"featured":6,"template":684},"six-reasons-cisco-learning-and-certifications-adopted-gitlab","content:en-us:blog:six-reasons-cisco-learning-and-certifications-adopted-gitlab.yml","Six Reasons Cisco Learning And Certifications Adopted Gitlab","en-us/blog/six-reasons-cisco-learning-and-certifications-adopted-gitlab.yml","en-us/blog/six-reasons-cisco-learning-and-certifications-adopted-gitlab",{"_path":912,"_dir":245,"_draft":6,"_partial":6,"_locale":7,"seo":913,"content":919,"config":925,"_id":927,"_type":16,"title":928,"_source":17,"_file":929,"_stem":930,"_extension":20},"/en-us/blog/how-cube-uses-gitlab-to-increase-efficiency-and-productivity",{"title":914,"description":915,"ogTitle":914,"ogDescription":915,"noIndex":6,"ogImage":916,"ogUrl":917,"ogSiteName":670,"ogType":671,"canonicalUrls":917,"schema":918},"Cube reduces toolchain complexity and speeds software delivery with GitLab","Software maker shares how the DevSecOps Platform helps improve customer collaboration and streamline releases.","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749668437/Blog/Hero%20Images/faster-cycle-times.jpg","https://about.gitlab.com/blog/how-cube-uses-gitlab-to-increase-efficiency-and-productivity","\n                        {\n        \"@context\": \"https://schema.org\",\n        \"@type\": \"Article\",\n        \"headline\": \"Cube reduces toolchain complexity and speeds software delivery with GitLab\",\n        \"author\": [{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"name\":\"GitLab\"}],\n        \"datePublished\": \"2023-02-07\",\n      }",{"title":914,"description":915,"authors":920,"heroImage":916,"date":922,"body":923,"category":14,"tags":924},[921],"GitLab","2023-02-07","Six years ago, [Cube](https://cube.nl/), a software development company based in the Netherlands, struggled with a fragmented and siloed toolchain. The company also wanted a comprehensive solution that would pull together development, security, and operations teams and create a single source of truth for better collaboration with their customers. So they opted for GitLab’s DevSecOps Platform.\n\nOperations Manager Mans Booijink and Lead Developer Remi Buijvoets sat down with GitLab to share how moving to an all-in-one DevSecOps platform has made a significant and positive difference at Cube – internally and with customers – and why they are happy with the move.\n\nBefore diving into their migration story, here's a snapshot of the improvements Cube has achieved with GitLab:\n\n- Improved [CI/CD](/topics/ci-cd/) delivery speed\t\n- Improved service-level agreement (SLA) response time\n- 80% of Cube clients are actively working in GitLab\n- Single source of truth collaboration\n\n![image of Mans Booijink](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/MansBooijinkCube.jpg) | ![image of Remi Buijvoets](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/RemiBuijvoetsCube.jpg)\nMans Booijink | Remi Buijvoets\n\n**Why did Cube make the switch to GitLab?**\n\nBefore making the switch, we used a combination of Bitbucket, Trello, and Jira. The combination caused a [fragmented, siloed toolchain](/blog/battling-toolchain-technical-debt/). There were a lot of opportunities for improving efficiency. So we started using GitLab because we wanted a DevOps system that includes ticket management, security, and customer collaboration. Not only does GitLab operate efficiently, but adoption is also fast and easy. In fact, we tripled our GitLab user base from 20 to nearly 70 in the past three years. Now almost the entire Cube organization uses GitLab. Our clients and colleagues (designers, developers, and project managers) can communicate easily by working in the same GitLab environment. \n\n**Did Cube try anything else before GitLab?**\n\nWe tried out other tools before moving to GitLab. But GitLab offered everything we needed – ticket management, CI/CD, DevOps, versioning, file management, and security. It didn’t take long to realize that GitLab was perfect because we wanted to have one tool where we all work together with our clients and team.\n\n**Now that Cube uses GitLab, how has your toolchain changed?**\n\nGitLab has simplified everything into a single source of truth. We deploy to a private cloud in the Netherlands, and we integrated Sentry into GitLab for error monitoring. Still, otherwise, everything we do is in GitLab.\n\n**How has GitLab CI/CD helped Cube?**\n\nGitLab CI helps us automate the software development process by using GitLab pipelines and a runner to deploy our code. Within the pipelines, we run linters to check code quality. Also, Unit and functional tests are executed to ensure the functioning of the application. When an error occurs or when a test fails, the pipeline will fail. GitLab CI adds value to our software development lifecycle because it prevents bugs from being deployed and helps deploy features while other features are still in development. In addition, it helps us monitor our projects’ quality, which is essential.\n\nGitLab CI surely helps in the speed of delivery, but also a lot in facilitating rollbacks when a release accidentally contains an error. We use a release schedule, and GitLab helps us to automate most of the work so that we can deliver right on time.\n\nGitLab CD improves the speed of our code deployments. When the pipelines succeed, developers can ensure everything works as it should. As a result, developers can focus more on the development itself and don’t have to lose focus by giving thoughts on the deployment. We have also introduced a local machine that builds releases. The machine is hosted on-premises and has a lot of resources. Multiple GitLab Runners use this machine to build releases. Using the GitLab Runners with an on-premises computer was easy to configure.\n\n**How have GitLab’s Agile capabilities helped your company become more efficient?**\n\nBefore GitLab, we used a variety of communication channels with our customers. Now GitLab gives us a central, accessible place for all communications. We also use [GitLab for Agile development](/solutions/agile-delivery/). We have our epics to manage bigger development projects, and we also utilize milestones. We do four to six releases weekly, and we all manage them by creating milestones that everyone can see, including the client and the development team. We provide all tickets with requirements, estimated time, when we intend to release it, who has to test it, etc. We use GitLab for 90% of our project management, Agile management, and working functionalities, which is proving very effective.\n\n**How do you measure the success of your GitLab migration?**\n\nWe measure the lead time of delivery. The results of each separate phase in the delivery are accurately logged. This way we can demonstrate that we comply with the agreements made to our customers. We also keep track of how efficient the different phases during the development process are, and whether they improve compared to the past.\n\nBecause we use GitLab integrally throughout the process, it is a very valuable and useful source of information.",[703,681,110],{"slug":926,"featured":6,"template":684},"how-cube-uses-gitlab-to-increase-efficiency-and-productivity","content:en-us:blog:how-cube-uses-gitlab-to-increase-efficiency-and-productivity.yml","How Cube Uses Gitlab To Increase Efficiency And Productivity","en-us/blog/how-cube-uses-gitlab-to-increase-efficiency-and-productivity.yml","en-us/blog/how-cube-uses-gitlab-to-increase-efficiency-and-productivity",{"_path":932,"_dir":245,"_draft":6,"_partial":6,"_locale":7,"seo":933,"content":939,"config":949,"_id":951,"_type":16,"title":952,"_source":17,"_file":953,"_stem":954,"_extension":20},"/en-us/blog/vestiaire-collective-on-moving-to-a-devsecops-platform",{"title":934,"description":935,"ogTitle":934,"ogDescription":935,"noIndex":6,"ogImage":936,"ogUrl":937,"ogSiteName":670,"ogType":671,"canonicalUrls":937,"schema":938},"Vestiaire Collective's DevSecOps migration: Wins and insights","Support for container registries and integrations with existing tools were the top reasons for the ecommerce company's migration to GitLab.","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749670278/Blog/Hero%20Images/fasttrack.jpg","https://about.gitlab.com/blog/vestiaire-collective-on-moving-to-a-devsecops-platform","\n                        {\n        \"@context\": \"https://schema.org\",\n        \"@type\": \"Article\",\n        \"headline\": \"Vestiaire Collective VP shares wins, insights, and what's next with DevSecOps migration\",\n        \"author\": [{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"name\":\"Chandler Gibbons\"}],\n        \"datePublished\": \"2023-01-05\",\n      }",{"title":940,"description":935,"authors":941,"heroImage":936,"date":943,"body":944,"category":14,"tags":945},"Vestiaire Collective VP shares wins, insights, and what's next with DevSecOps migration",[942],"Chandler Gibbons","2023-01-05","\n[Vestiaire Collective](https://us.vestiairecollective.com/), an online marketplace for second-hand clothing and luxury items, needed a faster and easier-to-use solution for code reviews and running pipelines. In 2018, the company migrated its codebase to GitLab for its speed and flexibility in setting up custom workflows and pipelines for releases. Since making the move, Vestiaire Collective has taken advantage of GitLab’s integrations with other tools — including [Jenkins for CI/CD](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/integration/jenkins.html), [Jira](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/integration/jira/) for issue management, and Nexus artifact storage — to improve productivity and simplify complex toolchains. We talked to Sardorbek Pulatov, vice president of engineering at Vestiaire Collective, about what his team has been able to achieve with the GitLab DevSecOps Platform and the lessons learned along the way.\n\n**What were the challenges that led Vestiaire Collective to explore GitLab?**\n\nWhen Vestiaire Collective started with GitLab back in 2018, we wanted to have a fast and in-house version control system with features such as running pipelines. One of the biggest chunks of our code base, the monolith, was on Subversion. We migrated to GitLab for speed and also the better maintainability, and code reviews being much easier. GitLab has also enabled us to set up workflows and pipelines for our releases. And recently we also created our own tool for releases because we have a custom workflow in Jira.\n\nNow we have not just engineers in GitLab, but also data engineers and data scientists. So, for example, data scientists manage their releases through their repositories in GitLab. They’re actually quite advanced in using GitLab, the data scientist teams. So they use everything new released by GitLab.\n\n**Since moving to a single platform for DevSecOps, what are the biggest benefits you’ve noticed? How has GitLab helped Vestiaire Collective simplify complicated toolchains?**\n\nWhen GitLab released support for container registries and npm, it was such a relief for us because we were using Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) and it was slow because it was in a different location — we deploy in Ireland but our team is spread across Europe and the United States. We also tried to use our own setup with Nexus and support it ourselves, meaning if there was a vulnerability we would need to update it and maintain it separately. Even if that’s only required once every six months, it still takes time. You still need to plan the upgrade. But with GitLab, our problem was solved. Now developers have [a registry for containers inside GitLab](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/packages/container_registry/) so they can easily push new releases of their services.\n\nThe fact that GitLab integrates with the other tools we are using has also been a huge benefit. We use Jira for project management, and thanks to GitLab’s Jira integration, whenever a developer pushes a commit in GitLab it’s fully visible in Jira. And now, with our custom integration, the releases are also synced, so when you create a release in GitLab, it creates a release with the same ticket in Jira.\n\nAs a next step, personally, I would love us to be able to migrate entirely into GitLab for project management, using GitLab [issues](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/issues/index.html) and [epics](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/group/epics/). We’re not there yet, but GitLab provides almost all the functionality needed for developers. Tracking everything in GitLab would make it much easier to reference the issues in code reviews. Now, when you create a ticket in Jira, you need to create a branch in GitLab with the Jira ticket number, and then, when you push a commit, you also need to remember the ticket number. But once everything is in GitLab, we’ll be able to just push a commit to a merge request. GitLab already gives us so much transparency into what we are doing. That would be even greater if everyone was using GitLab issues and epics.\n\n**What has the response from your team been like?**\n\nThere have been no complaints about stability or performance, and the performance is improving release by release! GitLab became very fast with [version 15](/releases/2022/05/22/gitlab-15-0-released/) — I can feel and see the performance boost. People are happy. People have been quiet, and when engineers are not complaining, that means that the tool is quite good. \n\n**For companies that are just getting started with GitLab, what advice would you give them on where to start?**\n\nI’d recommend starting with smaller projects, setting up all the steps needed for your pipeline, and trying to use features of GitLab such as issues and epics. In our case, we started with a larger project from our Product Information Management service team — the project’s repository had three services and we needed to run different pipelines for different changes. And even in our case, GitLab was quite flexible. We could say, “Okay, if a commit message has this specific word, then run these steps. If it has this word, run these other steps.”\n\nWhat we learned from that experience was that first it’s valuable to understand what you need to run as a pipeline. What comes to mind first is tests and probably deployment into an environment. Then we need to monitor the performance and see if we need to pass our caches in between the pipelines to speed up the deployment, or in the case of Node.js, do not download [npm packages](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/packages/npm_registry/) in every change or merge request or branch. Just cache it once in the first run. Then you can optimize step by step. So that’s what I mean by starting small.\n\n**What are you most looking forward to doing with GitLab in the future?**\n\nI love this question. First, I would like to point out that GitLab surprises me with each release. Personally, I am looking forward to using more automation tools for QA engineers, as well as auto pipelines and integrations with the latest automation frameworks.\n\nWe recently moved away from Sentry for error tracking, so I’m also interested in exploring doing [error tracking in GitLab](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/operations/error_tracking.html). And, I’m interested in seeing how we might be able to use [feature flags in GitLab](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/operations/feature_flags.html). We’re currently using LaunchDarkly for A/B testing, but if GitLab can even match half of that functionality, it would be great to bring everything together into one platform.\n\nFinally, we’re also looking into how we can make our GitLab implementation even better and more stable, so we want to deploy it into [a Kubernetes cluster](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/clusters/agent/). Currently, it’s just deployed into EC2s, so that would be our next big step for GitLab.\n\nPhoto by [Mathew Schwartz](https://unsplash.com/@cadop?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com)\n",[703,681,946,947,948],"performance","CI","CD",{"slug":950,"featured":6,"template":684},"vestiaire-collective-on-moving-to-a-devsecops-platform","content:en-us:blog:vestiaire-collective-on-moving-to-a-devsecops-platform.yml","Vestiaire Collective On Moving To A Devsecops Platform","en-us/blog/vestiaire-collective-on-moving-to-a-devsecops-platform.yml","en-us/blog/vestiaire-collective-on-moving-to-a-devsecops-platform",{"_path":956,"_dir":245,"_draft":6,"_partial":6,"_locale":7,"seo":957,"content":962,"config":968,"_id":970,"_type":16,"title":971,"_source":17,"_file":972,"_stem":973,"_extension":20},"/en-us/blog/how-we-increased-our-release-velocity-with-gitlab",{"title":958,"description":959,"ogTitle":958,"ogDescription":959,"noIndex":6,"ogImage":916,"ogUrl":960,"ogSiteName":670,"ogType":671,"canonicalUrls":960,"schema":961},"How we increased our release velocity with GitLab","Learn Evolphin's challenges, reasons for choosing the DevSecOps platform, and our end state following the transition.","https://about.gitlab.com/blog/how-we-increased-our-release-velocity-with-gitlab","\n                        {\n        \"@context\": \"https://schema.org\",\n        \"@type\": \"Article\",\n        \"headline\": \"How we increased our release velocity with GitLab\",\n        \"author\": [{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"name\":\"Rahul Bhargava, CTO, Evolphin\"}],\n        \"datePublished\": \"2022-12-05\",\n      }",{"title":958,"description":959,"authors":963,"heroImage":916,"date":965,"body":966,"category":14,"tags":967},[964],"Rahul Bhargava, CTO, Evolphin","2022-12-05","\nAt Evolphin, we have a remotely-distributed software development team creating the [Evolphin Zoom Media Asset Management system](https://evolphin.com/media-asset-management/). Our core R&D team is split across multiple geographies, with staff in India, the U.S., and the Philippines, as well as freelancers around the world. We needed to find new ways to address our team challenges and increase the pace of delivery of our product updates to Evolphin Zoom suite, in response to our customer needs. This blog outlines our challenges, reasons for choosing GitLab, and our end state, including a 30% to 40% increase in our release velocity, following the transition.\n\n## What is a media asset management system? \n\nWith the increased demand for video content for entertainment, marketing, customer engagement, etc., media asset management systems have become increasingly popular for collaborating, organizing, and archiving rich media assets. \n\nThe assorted camera card types, encoding formats, and publishing demands of social media and other video-on-demand services create a heterogenous content creation and publishing industry desperate for order. Media asset management systems are a timely answer to the problem of managing and unifying the diverse media assets characteristic of the industry.\n\nAt Evolphin, we’re at the heart of this solution with the Evolphin Zoom Media Asset Management system, an enterprise offering that runs on approximately 4.7 million lines of source code. To address the root of the problem, media asset management products like Evolphin Zoom must rapidly evolve - add new or enhance existing features - to meet customers’ ever-changing needs.\n\n## The problem: Slow updates\n\nBefore adopting GitLab, we used Subversion (Tortoise as the UI) as our source code repository and software version management system. We chose Subversion at the time because we needed an on-premises solution, as cloud-based branch management was not widely adopted in 2012 when we started working on the Evolphin Zoom. \n\nOur branching and merging workflow with Subversion was tedious, slow, and complicated. It took us around four to five weeks to manually manage and merge software changes across branches within this system. This meant that releasing each product update took five weeks at the very minimum. \n\n## Our requirement: Better collaboration for branch management\n\nWe needed a more agile solution to remain responsive to our customers' needs in this fast-paced software development environment. \n\nAs we transitioned to a remotely distributed workforce model, we identified a need for a software version management system designed with decentralized teams in mind. We wanted to be able to create a user story for a new feature in one week, test it with beta users the next week, and release it in production the week after. \n\nFor this level of agility, an affordable, open-source software repository with a platform like GitLab seemed the perfect solution.\n\n## Why GitLab?\n\nWith all the necessary tools for software review management and collaboration, GitLab appeared to fit our needs. \n\nThe ability to remotely check changes into a feature branch meant that users could check in a version and trigger a merge request for approval before merging changes from the remote user’s branch into the main software development branch. \n\nAll these features were available under GitLab’s free community version, with a user-friendly, visually-appealing UI that eased our transition from on-premises to cloud-based development. \n\n## End-state with GitLab\n\nHere is our workflow in numbers:\n\n| Total GitLab projects managed | 44  \t   \t\t\t\t\t\t|\t\n| Total branches \t\t\t\t| 514\t   \t\t\t\t\t\t|\n| Total repo size\t\t\t\t| 10.03 GB \t\t\t\t\t\t|\n| Total users\t\t\t\t\t| 33\t   \t\t\t\t\t\t|\n| Total groups\t\t\t\t\t| 15 \t   \t\t\t\t\t\t|\n| MFA-enabled\t\t\t\t\t| Yes \t   \t\t\t\t\t\t|\n| Number of files\t\t\t\t| 26125 text files  \t\t\t|\n| Number of unique files\t\t| 25090 unique files\t\t\t|\n| Code\t\t\t\t\t\t\t| 4,738,187 lines of code \t   \t|\n| GitLab product plan\t\t\t| Community plan on the cloud\t|\n\n\nOur new workflow depends on GitLab as the single source of truth for all our source code, binary dependencies, and DevOps projects. We currently have GitLab integrations with our CI/CD pipeline using Jenkins and our issue-tracking system - JetBrains YouTrack. Besides source code management (SCM), we use code review features frequently. In addition,  all our internal docs, requirements gathering, tips and tricks between developers, DevOps, and QA are shared in Wiki. All our collaboration happens over GitLab Wikis and SCM. Our developers and DevOps engineers use the same GitLab repo to make it easy to manage source code and build artifacts for deployment.\n\nSince the pandemic started, we have executed several Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud-based deployments. Some of our DevOps projects in GitLab are integrated with the AWS cloud formation stacks/scripts to enable consistent tenant deployments for our cloud customers.\n\n## Impact on Evolphin’s customers\n\nThe biggest transformation we noticed from adopting GitLab was a more seamless, collaborative, and efficient workflow for our R&D teams. \n\nFor example, a bug fix could be implemented in branches by developers working in parallel, which could then be merged into a pre-production branch for QA. Following the QA review, changes can be pushed to the main production branch for release. \n\nBeing open source, we can easily integrate with CI/CD platforms and the new workflow significantly improved our productivity regarding feature releases, especially taking into consideration our high volume of product updates. With GitLab, we can execute feature releases two to three weeks faster than previously. This includes twice-monthly feature changes, and monthly security updates, with annual major product changes. Overall, our release velocity increased by 30% to 40% just by switching from Subversion to a GitLab-based workflow.\n\n_Rahul Bhargava is the CTO and founder of Evolphin Software._\n",[946,885,110],{"slug":969,"featured":6,"template":684},"how-we-increased-our-release-velocity-with-gitlab","content:en-us:blog:how-we-increased-our-release-velocity-with-gitlab.yml","How We Increased Our Release Velocity With Gitlab","en-us/blog/how-we-increased-our-release-velocity-with-gitlab.yml","en-us/blog/how-we-increased-our-release-velocity-with-gitlab",{"_path":975,"_dir":245,"_draft":6,"_partial":6,"_locale":7,"seo":976,"content":982,"config":989,"_id":991,"_type":16,"title":992,"_source":17,"_file":993,"_stem":994,"_extension":20},"/en-us/blog/chris-hill-devops-enterprise-summit-talk",{"title":977,"description":978,"ogTitle":977,"ogDescription":978,"noIndex":6,"ogImage":979,"ogUrl":980,"ogSiteName":670,"ogType":671,"canonicalUrls":980,"schema":981},"How Jaguar Land Rover embraced CI to speed up their software lifecycle","Inspiration, persistence, an attitude of continuous improvement – how adopting CI helped this vehicle company implement software over the air.","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749667619/Blog/Hero%20Images/chris-hill-jlr-does.jpg","https://about.gitlab.com/blog/chris-hill-devops-enterprise-summit-talk","\n                        {\n        \"@context\": \"https://schema.org\",\n        \"@type\": \"Article\",\n        \"headline\": \"How Jaguar Land Rover embraced CI to speed up their software lifecycle\",\n        \"author\": [{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"name\":\"Rebecca Dodd\"}],\n        \"datePublished\": \"2018-07-23\",\n      }",{"title":977,"description":978,"authors":983,"heroImage":979,"date":985,"body":986,"category":14,"tags":987},[984],"Rebecca Dodd","2018-07-23","\n\n[CI/CD](/topics/ci-cd/) gets us pretty excited anyway, but it's not often we get to talk about how it improves something as cool as a luxury car. Chris Hill, Head of Systems Engineering for Infotainment at Jaguar Land Rover, recently shared his own team's journey from feedback loops of 4-6 weeks to just 30 minutes, in this inspiring talk from [DevOps Enterprise](/stages-devops-lifecycle/) Summit London 2018.\n\n\u003C!-- blank line -->\n\u003Cfigure class=\"video_container\">\n  \u003Ciframe src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/CEvjB-79tOs\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"true\"> \u003C/iframe>\n\u003C/figure>\n\u003C!-- blank line -->\n\n## Key takeaways from Chris' talk\n\n### What's needed for transformation\n\n\u003Cdiv class=\"panel panel-default twitter-block\"> \u003Ca class=\"twitter-block-link panel-body\" href=\"http://twitter.com/share?text=%22Driving change within an enterprise requires three qualities: inspiration, persistence, and an attitude of continuous improvement.%22 – @chillosuvia via @gitlab&url=https://about.gitlab.com/blog/chris-hill-devops-enterprise-summit-talk/&hashtags=\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Tweet!\"> \u003Cspan class=\"twitter-text pull-left\"> \"Driving change within an enterprise requires three qualities: inspiration, persistence, and an attitude of continuous improvement.\" – @chillosu via @gitlab \u003C/span> \u003Cspan class=\"click-to-tweet\"> Click to tweet! \u003Ci class=\"fab fa-twitter\">\u003C/i> \u003C/span> \u003C/a> \u003C/div>\n\n### How you respond to complaints matters\n\n> \"Equally if not more important than the complaint itself, is the response or reaction to the complaint. 'Can I bring a complaint, that I know my voice is heard and that somebody cares about resolving my issue?'\"\n\n> \"'I asked the ops team three weeks ago to add a build dependency on the build servers, and it still hasn't been added. I'm just going to go back to building on my own.' This complaint obviously is a knife right to the heart because you feel like you've started to regress. But what I like about this complaint is it led to a behavioral change as well as a technical change. We decided instead of continuing the same direction, to move to ephemeral Docker containers to run all of our builds. With ephemeral Docker containers we defined every piece of build infrastructure as code. We used packer recipes to find a Docker container, and every app developer could now change the underlying infrastructure which built their application. They were empowered. They now had the self service to do their lifecycle on their own. And you're never going to receive the ops complaint because you've handed over the keys.\"\n\n### Efficient feedback loops are critical\n\n> \"Our feedback loops were 4-6 weeks. Could you imagine writing code today and six weeks from now being told whether or not it works or is broken? I don't remember the shirt that I wore yesterday, let alone what I had for breakfast this morning, let alone what I wrote six weeks ago, and chances are I've been working on features for the last six weeks, and for me to try to unpick what I was thinking at that point could be a huge context-switch penalty.\"\n\n> \"Infotainment also had a significantly higher number of contributors – up to 1,000 contributors. And what we noticed is that contributions don't come linearly, they come in bursts. We actually found that Thursdays were the day that most of our developers committed on. And when we had manual code reviews, if we didn't have reviewers ready on a Thursday, we would create our own backlog.\"\n\n### Deployments don't have to be limited to a traditional release cycle\n\n> \"How could we change the game? Instead of ditching the combustion engine, we ditched the dealership visits, and we implemented software over the air. And this huge Linux distribution that we build upwards towards 700 times per day in a continuous integration pattern, on a dev branch or a master branch, or a release branch, we can now deliver to every vehicle in the form of small, incremental deltas. We can also deliver it to the vehicle while you're driving, and not interrupt your daily life. In fact I showed Gene yesterday, we started a download and an install while I was driving, and the entire thing happened in the background. Jeff even made the comment, 'This is blue-green deployment for vehicles.'\"\n\n> \"One of my favorite indicators is deploys per day, per developer. But I was always embarrassed to share ours because it was always below one. All of our new software wouldn't actually make it to vehicles; it was always batched together. Now I'm happy to say we can deploy, and we have been in our engineering environment, 50-70 times per day of each individual piece of software to a target or to a vehicle.\"\n\n> \"No longer are deployments limited to a traditional software release cycle. We've now skirted every single process to get a technician a new piece of software, and bother somebody else's day – one of our owners – to come into a dealership and spend an hour waiting for their vehicle to be done. We've now empowered the customer to be their own technician.\"\n",[786,885,947,725,988,681],"automotive",{"slug":990,"featured":6,"template":684},"chris-hill-devops-enterprise-summit-talk","content:en-us:blog:chris-hill-devops-enterprise-summit-talk.yml","Chris Hill Devops Enterprise Summit Talk","en-us/blog/chris-hill-devops-enterprise-summit-talk.yml","en-us/blog/chris-hill-devops-enterprise-summit-talk",2,[690,711,732,753,773,795,815,834,853],1753475285955]