Application Development Platform
The GitLab Application Development Platform refers to the set of GitLab features used to create, configure, and manage a complete software development environment. It provides development, operations, and security teams with a robust feature set aimed at supporting best practices out of the box.
Overview
The GitLab Application Development Platform aims to:
- Reduce and even eliminate the time it takes for an Operations team to provide a full environment for software developers.
- Get developers up and running fast so they can focus on writing great applications with a robust development feature set.
- Provide best-of-breed security features so that applications developed with GitLab are not affected by vulnerabilities that may lead to security problems and unintended use.
It is comprised of the following high-level elements:
- Compute
- Build, test, and deploy a wide range of applications
- Security
- Observability
We believe the use of these common building blocks equate to big gains for teams of all sizes, resulting from the adoption of newer, more efficient, more profitable, and less error-prone techniques for shipping software applications.
Compute
Because at GitLab we are cloud-native first our Application Development Platform initially focuses on providing robust support for Kubernetes, with other platforms to follow. Teams can bring their own clusters and we will additionally make it easy to create new infrastructure with various cloud providers.
Build, test, deploy
In order to provide modern DevOps workflows, our Application Development Platform will rely on Auto DevOps to provide those workflows. Auto DevOps works with any Kubernetes cluster; you're not limited to running on GitLab's infrastructure. Additionally, Auto DevOps offers an incremental consumption path. Because it is composable, you can use as much or as little of the default pipeline as you'd like, and deeply customize without having to integrate a completely different platform.
Security
The Application Development Platform helps you ensure that the applications you create are not affected by vulnerabilities that may lead to security problems and unintended use. This can be achieved by making use of the embedded security features of Auto DevOps, which inform security teams and developers if there is something to consider changing in their apps before it is too late to create a preventative fix. The following features are included:
- Auto SAST (Static Application Security Testing)
- Auto Dependency Scanning
- Auto Container Scanning
- Auto DAST (Dynamic Application Security Testing)
Observability
Performance is a critical aspect of the user experience, and ensuring your application is responsive and available is everyone's responsibility. The Application Development Platform integrates key performance analytics and feedback into GitLab, automatically. The following features are included: