GitLab’s CD Journey Without Kubernetes

GitLab has been very busy recently expanding on its leading software repository manager for DevOps to underpin its customers' continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) efforts. GitLab is also a very transparent company and actively communicates lessons it has learned along the way firsthand to better support its customers. As a case in point, Priyanka Sharma, director of technical evangelism at GitLab who serves on the board of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), recently surprised many by describing in a recent The New Stack blog post how GitLab began its CD journey without first completely shifting its underlying IT infrastructure to Kubernetes first. “We’re in the process of moving to Kubernetes, and we need to deploy even more frequently than we have in the past as we increase the velocity of feature development,” Sharma wrote. “But instead of modernizing completely with Kubernetes and then starting CD, we have opted to push our existing CI/CD system to the limit by using our preexisting legacy tools — and a lot of smarts.” In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast hosted by Alex Williams, founder and editor in chief of The New Stack, Sharma further discussed how GitLab has sought to not necessarily opt for necessarily the latest-and-greatest tools sets in its move to CD. Instead, the focus has been on finding the most direct path while maintaining the investments in and support of GitLab’s legacy systems. “We're now in a place where we will start slowly moving to canaries because now we're maxed out what we could do with this legacy system,” Sharma said.