GitLab version 15 goes big on visibility and observability

GitOps fans can take a spin on the free tier for pull-based deployment

One-stop DevOps shop GitLab has announced version 15 of its platform, hot on the heels of pull-based GitOps turning up on the platform's free tier.

Version 15.0 marks the arrival of GitLab's next major iteration and attention this time around has turned to visibility and observability – hardly surprising considering the acquisition of OpsTrace as 2021 drew to a close, as well as workflow automation, security and compliance.

GitLab puts out monthly releases so today's emission reflects what will be added to version 15 as time goes by. The platform will hit 15.1 on June 22.

During a chat with the company's senior director of Product, Kenny Johnston, at the recent Kubecon EU event, The Register was told that this was more where dollars were being invested into the product.

Of Opstrace, Johnston said: "We're going to be spending 15 integrating that really deeply with all of GitLab."

As well as having metrics, logs and traces on by default, Johnston spoke of a "fourth pillar of observability" in the form of error tracking. All would then be presented to the lucky developer cranking out code. "I can see this code has experienced 500 different types of errors in the last three weeks," Johnston said, by way of example, "so we can bring that right into context when a developer is writing code so that they're aware of how that application is performing or what kind of errors it receives."

The data also gives insight into the development process itself. "If you're a director or CTO, you want to know: is it working overall? But which groups are doing well? How can I learn from those groups and apply it to others?"

Heaven forbid that some less enlightened bosses might use all that data to administer a dressing down to whoever is dropping those 500 errors into the company's source.

As well as observability, plans are afoot for additional compliance and security features. As well as security policies, an intriguing feature is an exportable Software Bill of Materials and a signed attestation for build artifacts. "We're really excited about our ability to not just produce the bill of materials, but also produce that attestation that your bill of materials was secure along that whole delivery path," said Johnston.

Also upcoming in version 15 will be more support for data science teams and workloads.

Announced at Kubecon EU was support for pull-based deployment in GitLab's free tier, meaning a DevOps team can use the GitLab agent for Kubernetes to automatically spot and enact application changes.

"We've had that in our paid tiers," said Johnston, "but we found that there was a lot of interest in it, particularly for GitOps-style workflows for pull-based-style deployment workflow.

"Another component of us open-sourcing anything is that we also get contributors for it. You see a lot higher contributor volume to our open-source tech when it's in our free tier."

As for the future, Johnston told us that "we do see a lot more interest in SaaS and organizations not wanting to manage the software themselves," although, "the bulk of our business is in self-managed; customers oftentimes are choosing us over competitors because they can deploy [GitLab] wherever they want and deploy it within data sovereignty restrictions."

And the IDE? "Most people are using VS Code," said Johnston, "but we're seeing a lot more interest, particularly from enterprises [in a controlled environment]."

Shifting the security border from a developer's laptop to something a little more controlled certainly has an appeal and web-based IDEs from the likes of GitHub and Gitpod have been increasing in popularity. "We have an integration with Gitpod today," said Johnston, "but we'll be continuing to invest in our ability to have our own kind of code-space environment. ®

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