Here is an interesting twist: GitLab, which in many ways competes with GitHub as a shared code repository service for teams, is bringing its continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) features to GitHub.
The new service is launching today as part of GitLab’s hosted service. It will remain free to developers until March 22, 2019. After that, it’s moving to GitLab.com’s paid Silver tier.
GitHub itself offers some basic project and task management services on top of its core tools, but for the most part, it leaves the rest of the DevOps lifecycle to partners. GitLab offers a more complete CI/CD solution with integrated code repositories, but while GitLab has grown in popularity, GitHub is surely better known among developers and businesses. With this move, GitLab hopes to gain new users — and especially enterprise users — who are currently storing their code on GitHub but are looking for a CI/CD solution.
The new GitHub integration allows developers to set up their projects in GitLab and connect them to a GitHub repository. So whenever developers push code to their GitHub repository, GitLab will kick off that project’s CI/CD pipeline with automated builds, tests and deployments.
“Continuous integration and deployment form the backbone of modern DevOps,” said Sid Sijbrandij, CEO and co-founder of GitLab. “With this new offering, businesses and open source projects that use GitHub as a code repository will have access to GitLab’s industry leading CI/CD capabilities.”
It’s worth noting that GitLab offers a very similar integration with Atlassian’s BitBucket, too.
