GitLab is a web-basedDevOps lifecycle tool that provides a Git-repository manager providing wiki, issue-tracking and continuous integration/continuous deployment pipeline features, using an open-source license, developed by GitLab Inc. The software was created by Ukrainians Dmitriy Zaporozhets and Valery Sizov. The code was originally written in Ruby, with some parts later rewritten in Go, initially as a source code management solution to collaborate with his team on software development. It later evolved to an integrated solution covering the software development life cycle, and then to the whole DevOps life cycle. The current technology stack includes Go, Ruby on Rails and Vue.js. It follows an open-core development model where the core functionality is released under an open-source license while the additional functionality is under a proprietary license.
History
The product was originally named GitLab and was fully free and open-source software distributed under the MIT License. In July 2013, the product was split into two distinct versions: GitLab CE: Community Edition and GitLab EE: Enterprise Edition. At that time, the license of both remained the same, being both free and open-source software distributed under the MIT License. In February 2014, GitLab announced adoption of an open-core business model. GitLab EE is set under the source-available proprietary EE License, and contains features not present in the CE version. The GitLab CE licensing model remained unchanged and the company continued to develop and support CE edition. While GitLab EE changed to a restricted license, the source-code, issues and merge-requests remained publicly visible. In March 2015, GitLab acquired Gitorious, a competing Git hosting service. Gitorious had at the time around 822,000 registered users. Users were encouraged to move to GitLab, and the Gitorious service was discontinued in June 2015. In July 2015, the company raised an additional $1.5 million in seed funding. Customers as of 2015 included Alibaba Group, IBM, and SpaceX. In September 2015, GitLab raised $4 million in Series A funding from Khosla Ventures. In July 2016, the GitLab CEO confirmed the open-core business model of the company. In September 2016, GitLab raised $20 million in Series B funding from August Capital and others. In January 2017, a database administrator accidentally deleted the production database, in the aftermath of a cyber attack. Six hours' worth of issue and merge request data was lost. The recovery process was live-streamed on YouTube. On March 15, 2017, GitLab announced the acquisition of Gitter. Included in the announcement was the stated intent that Gitter would continue as a standalone project. Additionally, GitLab announced that the code would become open-source under an MIT License no later than June 2017. In October, 2017, GitLab raised $20 million in Series C funding from GV and others. In January, 2018, GitLab acquired Gemnasium; a service that provided security scanner with alerts for known security vulnerabilities in open-source libraries of various languages. The service was scheduled for complete shut-down on May 15. Gemnasium features and technology was integrated into GitLab EE and as part of CI/CD. In April 2018, GitLab announced integration with Google Kubernetes Engine to simplify the process of spinning up a new cluster to deploy applications. In May 2018, GNOME moved to GitLab with over 400 projects and 900 contributors. GitLab moved from Microsoft Azure to Google Cloud Platform in August 11, 2018, which made the service inaccessible to users in Crimea, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria, due to sanctions imposed by Office of Foreign Assets Control of the United States. On 19 September 2018, GitLab raised $100 million in Series D-round funding led by ICONIQ Capital. On 30 October 2018, GitLab is considered the first Ukrainian unicorn valued more than $1 billion. On 18 September 2019, GitLab raised $268 million in Series E-round funding led by Goldman Sachs and Iconiq Capital. For that moment the company was valued at $2.7 billion. In December 2019, it was reported that GitLab is expected to reach $100 million in annual recurring revenue in January 2020.
Company
GitLab Inc. was founded around the pre-existing GitLab software project. It is a limited liability corporation, officially launched by Sytse Sijbrandij and Dmitriy Zaporozhets in 2014. GitLab Inc. is an alumnus of the Y Combinatorseed accelerator programme of its Winter 2015 batch. It raised $1.5 million as seed funding. In September 2015, GitLab raised $4 million in Series A funding from Khosla Ventures. It was followed by Series B funding of $20 million by August Capital along with Khosla Ventures in September 2016. In October 2017, Google Ventures joined the investors leading the Series C funding of $20 million. In September 2018 GitLab raised $100 million in Series D funding led by Iconiq at $1.1 billion valuation. GitLab runs GitLab.com on a freemium and offers a subscription service. GitLab is headquartered in San Francisco. GitLab currently has 1,295 employees in 67 countries and regions.
GitLab Application
GitLab application offers functionality to automate the entire DevOps life cycle from planning to creation, build, verify, security testing, deploying, and monitoring offering high availability and replication, and scalability and available for using on-prem or cloud storage. Includes also a wiki, issue-tracking and CI/CD pipeline features. GitLab also offer GitLab Pages product for creating websites with Let's Encrypt support since version 12.1.
