GitLab

VSHN provides a dedicated GitLab instance just for you, on the cloud provider of your choice or your own infrastructure, and takes over operational responsibility for the instances as a fully managed service with guaranteed availability and support. GitLab is integral to most infrastructure, such as code or application development and deployment lifecycles for many of our customers, and it underpins all VSHN services. Ensuring GitLab runs smoothly allows us to focus on leveraging its full potential. That’s why we offer GitLab instances as a managed service—so you can focus on coding and collaboration.

GitLab is a comprehensive DevOps platform that offers a complete set of tools for software development, from version control to CI/CD and beyond. It combines Git repository management, code review, issue tracking, and CI/CD pipelines into a single application, highlighting some of its main features. This integration enables developers to efficiently manage the entire software development lifecycle—from planning to production—within a unified interface, emphasizing automation, testing, and security.

GitLab Features

• Git Repository Management: GitLab offers robust Git repository hosting with support for both public and private repositories. Developers can easily create, fork, clone, and collaborate on Git repositories using GitLab’s intuitive interface.
• Code Review: Built-in code review features enable collaborative development workflows. Developers can comment on specific lines of code, propose changes, and discuss improvements directly within merge requests, facilitating effective code collaboration and quality assurance.
• Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD): GitLab provides powerful CI/CD pipelines that automate the process of building, testing, and deploying applications. Developers can define custom pipelines using a “.gitlab-ci.yml” file, which supports parallel execution, stages, and job dependencies. This ensures that code changes are automatically tested and deployed in a controlled manner, improving productivity and reducing errors.
• Issue Tracking and Agile Development: GitLab includes issue boards, milestones, and labels to help track tasks, bugs, and feature requests. Agile teams can manage their projects using Scrum or Kanban methodologies directly within GitLab, making planning, prioritizing, and monitoring progress easier.
• Container Registry and Kubernetes Integration: GitLab offers a built-in container registry for containerized applications to store Docker images. It also provides seamless integration with Kubernetes, allowing developers to deploy applications to Kubernetes clusters directly from GitLab CI/CD pipelines. This simplifies the process of managing and scaling containerized applications in production environments.
• Code and Dependency Security Scanning: GitLab’s Code and Dependency Security Scanning feature provides comprehensive analysis and detection of vulnerabilities in both source code and dependencies, ensuring that potential security risks are identified and mitigated early in the development lifecycle.

Why Managed GitLab by VSHN

• Dedicated GitLab server instance: You don’t have to share the GitLab with any other customer. You control where your data is located and how the system is accessed to ensure the highest level of compliance.
• Control over the configuration: The user management gives full administrative access to the GitLab configuration, the user management, and the repositories, allowing for tweaking of the GitLab to the requirements.
• Works with all GitLab plans: Free, Premium, and Ultimate: Whether you prefer the Free (previously Community Edition CE), Premium, or Ultimate (previously Enterprise Edition EE) GitLab plans, we can take care of the server management and licensing for you, or you can bring your own existing license (BYOL).
• More GitLab features than GitLab SaaS: See the “only available on Self-Managed” features on the GitLab website.
• Flexible sizing: The underlying infrastructure supports all CPU/RAM/Storage combinations. See the Requirements below.
• Flexible GitLab CI workers: You can bring your own GitLab CI workers, let VSHN manage dedicated workers for you, or integrate a Kubernetes cluster to schedule CI jobs as pods and auto-scale the cluster.
• VSHN is among the few GitLab select partners with the highest partner status.
• We’re part of the Swiss GitLab community, for example organizing the GitLab Switzerland Meetup.

Comprehensive expertise and hands-on support. With a Managed GitLab by VSHN, we leverage our experience and expertise from running GitLab for almost 10 years now. With our AppFlow and AppOps services, we can also support you in CI/CD pipeline engineering and teach you best to integrate GitLab into your developer’s workflow.

Pricing

Managed GitLab Server Instance: CHF 300.- per month, free setup.

Managed GitLab CI Instance: CHF 200.- per month, free setup.

• This excludes cloud providers or your infrastructure, computing resources, and storage.
• Based on the GitLab Free plan, Premium or Ultimate is optionally available and fully supported:

Contact us now for a free requirements analysis and offer!

Included in a VSHN-managed Service

• Provisioning on any infrastructure (access and supported infrastructure required) by VSHN.
• Automated encrypted off-site backup and on-demand restore of server configuration and GitLab data. Including 100GB of free backup storage.
• Alerting to VSHN and Incident handling (restore of service) by VSHN, according to SLA
• Weekly Maintenance by VSHN (Server and GitLab components software updates) and Zero-day security fixes
• GitLab version upgrade path, supported by VSHN
• Scaling. Scale your computing resources up and down when needed.
• Usage support and small changes included; see https://products.vshn.ch/managedservice/index.html#_support

FAQ

• What does infrastructure mean?
  Suppose you can provide a Ubuntu Virtual machine with “root access” for VSHN and some outbound and inbound network connections. Our Puppet Management Framework can take over this VM and provision the Managed GitLab service.
• How does Maintenance work?
  VSHN takes over recurring maintenance work, including GitLab minor and security updates. As the service will be unavailable for a short period of time, you can select from different maintenance windows.
• Why is GitLab provided for virtual machines and not for Kubernetes?
  We plan to integrate GitLab into our AppCat Framework for fully automated provisioning and more scalability. GitLab recommends the omnibus installation method on VMs, which has no feature limitations. We have years of experience with this and a solid framework for provisioning, configuring, and maintaining GitLab instances.

References

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