Migrating from Bitbucket to Gitlab: My Experience
Published in
4 min readApr 18, 2023
The DevOps space is an ever-growing space with lots of innovation and changes in the choice of tools. This time, I worked with my team at Indicina to migrate from Bitbucket to Gitlab. In this article, I shall be explaining the strategies that we used to ensure the smooth transition from Bitbucket to Gitlab with no downtime in our deployment processes and uptime on the applications in production. Some of the reasons we moved from Bitbucket to Gitlab were:
- Cost: Gitlab is more affordable to run than Bitbucket. Gitlab gives a lot of features for free. There can be a lot of users on Gitlab and you do not have to pay for seats, only for premium features like; advanced pull request management, branch locking, and more.
- Availability: There were issues with pipeline availability on Bitbucket that hindered deployment for the team. So we needed another Git hosting service that will provide higher availability.
- Self-hosted Runner: Gitlab has a rich interface for self-hosted runners. Since we needed to improve delivery with faster pipelines, we needed to host our own runners, so that we control the speed of build and deployment.
Planning Phase
The first stage of the migration process is the planning phase, we need to plan how the migration will work and how long it will take to move the code. The migration had two major components:
- Application Source Code
- Deployment Script
