What does GitLab do?
A complete platform for building and deploying software.
Last updated: March 12, 2025
The TL;DR
GitLab is a somewhat contrarian take on DevOps: it’s basically one giant tool for literally anything you’d want to do relating to building and deploying software.
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DevOps spans the gamut in software, from source control to performance monitoring
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Traditionally, teams have used different tools for each part of the DevOps pipeline
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GitLab brings the entire process together with a single platform for DevOps
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Product lines include source control, issue tracking, CI/CD, and monitoring
GitLab is a very non-traditional company – beyond their unusual approach to the market, they operate completely remotely, publicly publish their internal guidelines, and are open source. They also IPOd recently, and are now worth $15B – so it’s an organization worth understanding.
Companies Mentioned
The Gitlab product: everything DevOps
Understanding GitLab means understanding DevOps, which is thankfully the subject of this recent Technically post. The norm – for sure at small to medium size companies – is that each part of the complicated DevOps workflow, from issue tracking to source control, requires a disparate tool.
Gitlab, though, provides tools for every step of the DevOps process, from issue tracking to monitoring. Their take is that you should be doing all of this in one, single tool to consolidate your stack. This comical visualization on their old homepage puts things into perspective:
Refresher: what’s DevOps?
Understanding GitLab means understanding DevOps , which is thankfully the subject of this recent Technically post. Here’s a quick refresher if you can’t be bothered to cl...