Gitlab Explained: What is Gitlab and Why Use It?

what's up guys welcome back to the channel and for this video I want to talk about one of my favorite tools gitlab now gitlab is the most popular open source software for managing your devops workflows and getting visibility on all your projects and it's honestly been my go-to for anything when I'm doing any side project any startup I pretty much use that every company except my current one we currently use GitHub with some other tools that accomplish the same thing but I want to talk about why gitlab is awesome not sponsored by them by no means it's truly a fan so let's break down why gitlab is first we need to talk about devops and understanding gitlab means understanding devops much of the tedious process of building software is actually what happens after you write the code testing that code to make sure it's going to work for your users and then actually getting it out there in the wild and monitoring it to make sure it's performing well that's all part of the process so when referring to devops there are three pieces we need to understand there's Ci or continuous integration testing your code for going CD or continuous deployment deploy your code frequently application performance monitoring keeping an eye on your app performance so imagine you have been given a task to write a new feature you've done a great job you coded up and now what it's really two things left you need to merge that code into the rest of the code bit including testing it heavily across a few Dimensions make sure you don't break anything second you need to push the updated code base finally once it's out in the wild you need to make sure it performs well which is again the CI CD APM part of it this is basically what devops is and let me just let me just put this out there when you Google devops when you talk to people about devops there's a lot of permutations on what devops did some say it's a philosophy some say it's a series of tools a process you but for this video we are really saying devops and how it relates to workflows and tooling which is why we think git lab is a great tool for anything devops related now depending on where you work let's say for issue tracking where we keep track of our our bugs and our tickets you might use jira Monday Asana for Source control you might be hosting your code so you might use GitHub you might use big bucket you might use gitlab you might use something different for cicd testing and exploring your code there are too many tools to name to be honest with you guys but through CI Jenkins or hardness so jfrog does Argo there's a lot of tools that do that piece for all the people hitting me up on LinkedIn no I'm not interested in using your tool right now but for monitoring there are popular ones like datadog grafana New Relic and the list goes on and on both companies use multiple tools to avoid vendor lock-in get Labs take and you should be doing all of this in one platform and consolidate your stack gitlab in my opinion is great if you're a startup if you're a smaller org or you don't have a lot of moving pieces you don't have a lot of resources because gitlab is really all about giving you everything you need to get started again you can use gitlab for issue tracking so similar to jira you can make tickets and you can create bugs and you can organize and you have a backlog the way I've always used gitlab is mainly for Version Control you can use it to manage your code repository to handle merging and changes from your team similar to GitHub but I've always liked the UI of gitlab over GitHub that's just a personal preference and remember the actual application code is hosted on gitlab servers a developer pull local copies of that code onto their laptop to develop new feature their bugs but what I do like about gitlab it provides a utility for packaging and storing any dependency that your application relies on so we're talking about packages container registry most teams use packet managers like npm for more Mission critical applications with logger packages teams will use something like gitlab to store and host those packages you can do the same thing on other platforms but gitlab is a One-Stop shop CI CD I just love to see ICD on gitlab because you can actually build out the steps you can create the yaml file and it's really really nice visual to see like things moving from left to right where it's building it's testing it's deploying maybe you have different environments where you have a stage and a production maybe something needs to happen before you go to production maybe you want to add an additional yes I've tested it I looked at it hit the button go to Pride gitlab gives you those types of capabilities and lastly you can do monitoring now get lab I will be honest it doesn't necessarily have maybe the same features of like a data dog or a New Relic but it is available and for most people starting off it offers plenty for at least most to get started some closing notes gitlab to me has really found its way to get into organizations that are trying to do a lot of different things but want some customization behind it and it gives them the flexibility to say hey you can do everything on gitlab it really is a One-Stop shop for everything you probably need to get started under application but what do we miss what questions do you have am I completely wrong is GitHub Superior to get let me know in the comments below that's all I got Tech out [Music]

Channel: People In Tech

Views: 16,211

Keywords: gitlab, tech, software engineering, engineering leadership, version control, git, github, web developer, backend developer, full stack development, how to become a developer

Id: bnF7f1zGpo4

Length: 5min 8sec (308 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 23 2022