GitLab Explained: The Whole DevOps Lifecycle in One Platform
Introduction A modern software team juggles many tools: Git hosting, issue tracking, code review, CI/CD pipelines (the GitHub Actions post), and security scanning — often from different vendors that barely talk to each other. GitLab, launched in 2011, takes the opposite approach: one open-source platform that covers the entire DevOps lifecycle, from planning a feature to monitoring it in production, with Git at its centre. Its pitch is a single application for the whole workflow, and for teams tired of tool sprawl, that pitch lands. One platform, from issue to production GitLab organises work around projects (repositories) and groups, and its pieces connect by design: Plan — issues, milestones, and boards for tracking work, with merge requests (GitLab's pull requests) as the review unit Code — Git hosting with branching and protected branches (the Git post's model, enforced by the platform) CI/CD — pipelines defined in a .gitlab-ci.yml file in the repo itself, running tests an...