Software Update: GitLab 11.5

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You can compare GitLab with the more famous GitHubbut contains some subtle differences† It is an environment for managing Git repositories on-premises and is released under the MIT Expat license and developed in Ruby on Rails. It is available in two versions, namely the free-to-use Community Edition and a paid Enterprise Edition, with more features aimed at large businesses. The two flavors are on this page explained. The development team has released GitLab 11.5 and the release notes for this release can be found below.

Group dashboard for security teams
For a long time, developers have used GitLab as a tool to secure their code. But now, GitLab is making security teams first-class citizens so they can use GitLab to effect better application security and ensure compliance. With 11.5, the Group Security Dashboard pulls together all of the information security personnel need into one place, so folks like CISOs, CIOs, and application security leaders get a specific view designed for them. The group dashboard has a redesigned look and new visualizations, bringing together security information across multiple projects and providing a high-level view while also enabling the ability to drill down into specific reports. With 11.5, we’re starting with SAST reports, and we’ll be adding more to the group dashboard in the future. Our goal is to build a single tool that security teams can use instead of needing to switch back and forth between multiple tools.

New dashboard for operations teams
In the same way that the Group Security Dashboard makes security teams first-class citizens, the Operations Dashboard provides a tailored experience for operations professionals. This instance-wide dashboard provides a single view across projects to get a summary of each project’s operational health, including pipeline and alert status.

Control access to GitLab Pages
GitLab Pages is an easy way to serve static content on the web, making it perfect for use cases such as documentation for your project. But what about private projects where documentation and other static artifacts should only be accessed by project members? In the past, you’d either have to make your assets public to take advantage of Pages, or you would not be able to use the feature at all.

Now, in GitLab 11.5, the same access control permissions that apply to your issues and code can also be applied to static webpages served by GitLab Pages. Unauthenticated users will get a 404 when visiting the link. As of today, access controls for GitLab pages is available for self-managed GitLab, with GitLab.com support coming soon.

This is a unique feature that we’re particularly proud of because it comes from our open source community. Access control for Pages has been one of our most requested features and the code has been community contributed as well!

Knative for Kubernetes
“Serverless” is a popular, yet often misunderstood industry term. Some folks equate serverless with “Function as a Service,” or FaaS, but this isn’t quite accurate. In a nutshell, serverless enables a programming paradigm where you are able to focus on writing business logic without having to understand or even worry about the underlying infrastructure where your software is deployed. As such, both functions and applications can be serverless.

Knative is a Kubernetes-based platform to build, deploy, and manage modern serverless workloads, and GitLab 11.5 comes with the ability to easily deploy and integrate Knative with GitLab. You can now install Knative to your connected Kubernetes cluster with a single click. With GitLab 11.5, you’ll be able to use Knative for your serverless applications, with serverless functions coming in 11.6.

Today, Knative is still in alpha, but there are some compelling reasons to deploy applications using Knative as it comes with some powerful functionality out-of-the-box. In particular, Knative manages pod scaling for you so you can automatically scale up, or even scale down to zero without additional configuration. Additionally, Knative comes with eventing built in so using it to deploy microservices makes it easier to manage inter-process communication between your producer and consumer services.

And so much more!
With so many great features in this release, we couldn’t pack them all into the intro. Be sure to read up on other exciting new features like the parallel attribute for faster pipelines, redesigned Issue Board cards, and an initial Jaeger integration. We’ve made big improvements in this release to make code review easier and more useful, including the ability to comment on unchanged lines in merge requests, preview merge request reviews before submitting, and assign approvers based on Code Owners along with Review App direct links . Keep reading to see all of the features that are part of this release.

Version number 11.5
Release status Final
Operating systems Linux
Website GitLab
Download
License type GPL
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