GitHub announced the launch of their continuous integration tool, GitHub Actions, entering into competition with 14 of its continuous integration marketplace vendors, including Travis CI, CircleCI, and CodeShip. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen GitHub compete against a popular area of its marketplace; they also compete against marketplace vendors in the project management (Waffle.io vs. issue boards) and dependency scanning categories (Snyk).
Why compete with vendors within their own marketplace? Similar to Amazon’s private brands, which compete in categories with well-established leaders on its own platform, all-in-one is eating the marketplace model, and GitHub is ready to eat its own marketplace to stay competitive.
Today’s increasingly complex technology landscape demands a simplified and seamless all-in-one solution—and built-in continuous integration is a logical first step. We know this because when we decided to build a single application for the entire DevOps lifecycle, integrated pipelines were the critical first step to helping development teams build, test, deploy, and monitor their code. Companies like Ticketmaster and Paessler AG have shown us that when teams are working within a seamlessly integrated application experience, cycle times are reduced by as much as 200%, and the speed of pipelines can be reduced from over two hours to within eight minutes.
While there will undoubtedly be space for some successful point solutions, we’re seeing a turning point from disparately integrated toolchains to all-in-one solutions in the tech tools landscape.
Need for speed and simplicity
Software development and delivery is getting more complicated, requiring more tools per team and project. The advent of Kubernetes has brought a desire for DevOps and with it an avalanche of highly focused, sharp tools. The proliferation of teams and tools makes toolchain maintenance unmanageable and cumbersome, slowing down cycle times and inhibiting collaboration at a time when speed to market is critical to business success. Chaining together tools comes at too great of a cost. The explosion of microservices has exacerbated the issue. As more development teams embrace cloud native, building and running application in containers, the number of projects multiples and changes need to be made frequently. Disparate toolchains were not built to handle this level of integration complexity.
A single application removes this complexity, providing a single setup, datastore, flow, and interface where teams can work collaboratively and concurrently. It enables Concurrent DevOps, removing the need for sequential handoffs, allowing cross-functional collaboration at speed. Developers, engineers, product managers, and security experts can all work on their piece without slowing each other down, allowing better visibility into work in flight, and the opportunity to shift left contributions from various teams.
Eliminating context switching, automated links between environments, code, issues, and epics, real-time updates, and everything in context are just a few reasons the all-in-one model beats out the toolchain. For a complete list, see our advantages of a single application page.
GitLab is a single application for the entire DevOps lifecycle
We shipped GitLab CI/CD in 2016, and completed our Master Plan to ship the entire software development lifecycle by the end of 2016. For the past two years, we’ve been continuously improving our single application, and we’re now working on packaging, monitoring, Kubernetes, and even serverless.
We’ve made a couple of acquisitions to integrate great point-solutions into our single application. It’s our prediction that we will see more acquisitions, big and small, across the technology landscape as the demand for an all-in-one solution grows.
