GitLab announced their 13.0 release with AWS ECS support for AutoDevops pipelines, Gitaly highly available cluster support, vulnerability management and improvements in viewing Epics. It also adds features in security scanning, support for Terraform state storage, and a reduced memory footprint.
The Gitaly component in GitLab provides high-level RPC access to Git repositories to other Gitlab components. Prior to 13.0, highly available (HA) storage was enabled by NFS (Network File System). Gitaly was initially built as a solution to get around NFSs' numerous issues. The 13.0 release adds HA to Gitaly clusters, obviating the need to use NFS.
GitLab's AutoDevops feature enables users to set up a complete workflow with builds, vulnerability scanning, testing, deployment and monitoring using predefined templates. This release adds support for automatic deployment to AWS ECS clusters in AutoDevops. The previous releases integrated with Kubernetes clusters, with specific support for Google Kubernetes Engine.
Also on the automation tools side, 13.0 enables merge request (MR) reviewers to directly view the output of Terraform plan commands. Terraform 'plan' is a pre-run stage when using Terraform for infrastructure automation which shows the list of changes that will be made. The ability to view these changes directly in the MR aims to make it easier to inspect changes that will occur in the infra without running the 'terraform plan' command manually. Users can also store their Terraform state files in Gitlab now instead of using another backend.
The 13.0 release adds a way to view hierarchies of Epics visually. Epics are a way to track issues and features across projects and milestones within a group. This is available in the non-free versions of GitLab.
The new release adds to the list of security related features. Static Application Security Testing (SAST) support has been added for the .NET Framework to the list of supported languages, and Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) for REST APIs. It also introduces software vulnerability objects as first-class entities that other components like issues and wikis can link to and track using a unique URL. The entire commit history can now be scanned for secrets that might have been accidentally committed.
Other features in this release include versioning of snippets, a dark theme for the in-browser editor, and partial cloning for large objects. Puma has replaced Unicorn as the default web server from 13.0 onwards. According to the release notes, Puma reduces the overall memory consumption by about 40%.
The complete release notes can be viewed on the official announcement, and there are some points to note while upgrading. GitLab is available both as a SaaS solution and as a self-hosted software.