[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":794},["ShallowReactive",2],{"/en-us/blog/how-indeed-transformed-its-ci-platform-with-gitlab":3,"navigation-en-us":41,"banner-en-us":440,"footer-en-us":450,"blog-post-authors-en-us-Carl Myers":690,"blog-related-posts-en-us-how-indeed-transformed-its-ci-platform-with-gitlab":705,"assessment-promotions-en-us":745,"next-steps-en-us":784},{"id":4,"title":5,"authorSlugs":6,"body":8,"categorySlug":9,"config":10,"content":14,"description":8,"extension":27,"isFeatured":12,"meta":28,"navigation":12,"path":29,"publishedDate":20,"seo":30,"stem":35,"tagSlugs":36,"__hash__":40},"blogPosts/en-us/blog/how-indeed-transformed-its-ci-platform-with-gitlab.yml","How Indeed Transformed Its Ci Platform With Gitlab",[7],"carl-myers",null,"customer-stories",{"slug":11,"featured":12,"template":13},"how-indeed-transformed-its-ci-platform-with-gitlab",true,"BlogPost",{"title":15,"description":16,"authors":17,"heroImage":19,"date":20,"body":21,"category":9,"tags":22},"How Indeed transformed its CI platform with GitLab","The world's #1 job site migrated thousands of projects to GitLab CI, boosting productivity and cutting costs. Learn the benefits they realized, including a 79% increase in daily pipelines.",[18],"Carl Myers","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1750099351/Blog/Hero%20Images/Blog/Hero%20Images/Indeed-blog-cover-image-2_4AgA1DkWLtHwBlFGvMffbC_1750099350771.png","2024-08-27","***Editor's note: From time to time, we invite members of our customer community to contribute to the GitLab Blog. Thanks to Carl Myers, Manager of CI Platforms at Indeed, for sharing your experience with GitLab.***\n\nHere at Indeed, our mission is to help people get jobs. Indeed is the [#1 job site](https://www.indeed.com/about?isid=press_us&ikw=press_us_press%2Freleases%2Faward-winning-actress-viola-davis-to-keynote-indeed-futureworks-2023_textlink_https%3A%2F%2Fwww.indeed.com%2Fabout) in the world with more than 350 million unique visitors every month.\n\nFor Indeed's Engineering Platform teams, we have a slightly different motto: \"We help people to help people get jobs.\" As part of a data-driven engineering culture that has spent the better part of two decades always putting the job seeker first, we are responsible for building the tools that not only make this possible, but empower engineers to deliver positive outcomes to job seekers every day.\n\nGitLab Continuous Integration has allowed Indeed’s CI Platform team of just 11 people to effectively support thousands of users across the company. Other benefits Indeed has realized by moving to GitLab CI include:\n- 79% increase in daily pipelines\n- 10-20% lower CI hardware costs\n- Decreased support burden\n\n## Evolving our CI platform: From Jenkins to a scalable solution\n\nLike many large technology companies, we built our CI platform organically as the company scaled, using the de facto open source and industry standard solutions available at the time. Back in 2007, when Indeed had fewer than 20 engineers, we were using Hudson, Jenkins’ direct predecessor.\n\nToday, through nearly two decades of growth, we have thousands of engineers. As new technology became available, we made incremental improvements, switching to Jenkins around 2011. Another improvement allowed us to move most of our workloads to dynamic cloud worker nodes using [AWS EC2](https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/). As we entered the Kubernetes age, however, the system architecture reached its limits.\n\nJenkins’ architecture was not created with the cloud in mind. Jenkins operates by having a \"controller\" node, a single point of failure that runs critical parts of a pipeline and farms out certain steps to worker nodes (which can scale horizontally to some extent). Controllers are also a manual scaling axis.\n\nIf you have too many jobs to fit on one controller, you must partition your jobs across controllers manually. CloudBees offers ways to mitigate this, including the CloudBees Jenkins Operations Center, which allows you to manage your constellation of controllers from a single centralized place. However, controllers remain challenging to run in a Kubernetes environment because each controller is a fragile single point of failure. Activities like node rollouts or hardware failures cause downtime.\n\nIn addition to the technical limitations baked into Jenkins itself, our CI platform also had several problems of our own making. For example, we used the Groovy Jenkins DSL to generate jobs from code in each repository. This led to each project having its own copy-pasted job pipeline, resulting in hundreds of versions that were hard to maintain and update. While Indeed’s engineering culture values flexibility and allows teams to operate in separate repositories, this flexibility became a burden as teams spent too much time addressing regular maintenance requests.\n\nRecognizing our technical debt, we turned to the [Golden Path pattern](https://tag-app-delivery.cncf.io/whitepapers/platforms/), which allows flexibility while providing a default route to simplify updates and encourage consistent practices across projects.\n\nThe CI Platform team at Indeed is not very large. Our team of around 11 engineers supports thousands of users, fielding support requests, performing upgrades and maintenance, and enabling always-on support for our global company.\n\nBecause our team not only supports our GitLab instance but also the entire CI platform, including the artifact server, our shared build code, and multiple other custom components of our platform, we had our work cut out for us. We needed a plan that would help us address our challenges while making the most efficient use of our existing resources.\n\n## Moving to GitLab CI\n\nAfter a careful design review with key stakeholders, we decided to migrate the entire company from Jenkins to GitLab CI. The primary reasons for choosing GitLab CI were:\n- We were already using GitLab for source code management.\n- GitLab is a complete offering that provides everything we need for CI.\n- GitLab CI is designed for scalability and the cloud.\n- GitLab CI enables us to write templates that extend other templates, which is compatible with our golden path strategy.\n- GitLab is open source software and the GitLab team has always been supportive in helping us submit fixes, giving us extra flexibility and reassurance.\n\nBy the time we officially announced that the GitLab CI Platform would be generally available to users, we already had 23% of all builds happening in GitLab CI from a combination of grassroots efforts and early adopters.\n\nThe challenge of the migration, however, would be the long tail. Due to the number of custom builds in Jenkins, an automated migration tool would not work for the majority of teams. Most of the benefits of the new system would not come until the old system was at 0%. Only then could we turn off the hardware and save the CloudBees license fee.\n\n## Feature parity and the benefits of starting over\n\nThough we support many different technologies at Indeed, the three most common languages are Java, Python, and JavaScript. These language stacks are used to make libraries, deployables (web services or applications), and cron jobs (a process that runs at regular intervals, for example, to build a data set in our data lake). Each of these formed a matrix of project types (Java Library, Python Cronjob, JavaScript Webapp, etc.) for which we had a skeleton in Jenkins. Therefore, we had to produce a golden path template in GitLab CI for each of these project types.\n\nMost users could use these recommended paths without change, but for those who did require customization, the golden path would still be a valuable starting point and enable them to change only what they needed, while still benefiting from centralized template updates in the future.\n\nWe quickly realized that most users, even those with customizations, were happy to take the golden path and at least try it. If they missed their customizations, they could always add them later. This was a surprising result! We thought that teams who had invested in significant customization would be loath to give them up, but in the majority of cases teams just didn't care about them anymore. This allowed us to migrate many projects very quickly — we could just drop the golden path (a small file about 6 lines long with includes) into their project, and they could take it from there.\n\n## InnerSource to the rescue\n\nThe CI Platform team also adopted a policy of \"external contributions first\" to encourage everyone in the company to participate. This is sometimes called InnerSource. We wrote tests and documentation to enable external contributions — contributions from outside our immediate team — so teams that wanted to write customizations could instead include them in the golden path behind a feature flag. This let them share their work with others and ensure we didn't break them moving forward (because they became part of our codebase, not theirs).\n\nThis also had the benefit that particular teams who were blocked waiting for a feature they needed were empowered to work on the feature themselves. We could say \"we plan to implement the feature in a few weeks, but if you need it earlier than that we are happy to accept a contribution.\" In the end, many core features necessary for parity were developed in this manner, more quickly and better than our team had resources to do it. The migration would not have been a success without this model.\n\n## Ahead of schedule and under budget\n\nOur CloudBees license expired on April 1, 2024. This gave us an aggressive target to achieve the full migration. This was particularly ambitious considering that at the time, 80% of all builds (60% of all projects) still used Jenkins for their CI. This meant over 2,000 [Jenkinsfiles](https://www.jenkins.io/doc/book/pipeline/jenkinsfile/) would still need to be rewritten or replaced with our golden path templates.\n\nTo achieve this target, we made documentation and examples available, implemented features where possible, and helped our users contribute features where they were able.\n\nWe started regular office hours, where anyone could come and ask questions or seek our help to migrate. We additionally prioritized support questions relating to migration ahead of almost everything else. Our team became GitLab CI experts and shared that expertise inside our team and across the organization.\n\nAutomatic migration for most projects was not possible, but we discovered it could work for a small subset of projects where customization was rare. We created a Sourcegraph batch change campaign to submit merge requests to migrate hundreds of projects, and poked and prodded our users to accept these MRs.\n\nWe took success stories from our users and shared them widely. As users contributed new features to our golden paths, we advertised that these features \"came free\" when you migrated to GitLab CI. Some examples included built-in security and compliance scanning, Slack notifications for CI builds, and integrations with other internal systems.\n\nWe also conducted a campaign of aggressive \"scream tests.\" We automatically disabled Jenkins jobs that hadn't run or succeeded in a while, and told users that if they needed them, they could turn them back on. This was a low-friction way to identify which jobs were actually needed. We had thousands of jobs that hadn't been run a single time since our last CI migration (which was Jenkins to Jenkins). This told us we could safely ignore almost all of them.\n\nIn January 2024, we nudged our users by announcing that all Jenkins controllers would become read-only (no builds) unless an exception was explicitly requested. We had much better ownership information for controllers and they generally aligned with our organization's structure, so it made sense to focus on controllers rather than jobs. The list of controllers was also a much more manageable list than the list of jobs.\n\nTo obtain an exception, we asked our users to find their controllers in a spreadsheet and put their contact information next to each one. This enabled us to get a guaranteed up-to-date list of stakeholders we could follow up with as we sprinted to the finish line, but also enabled users to clearly let us know which jobs they absolutely needed. At peak, we had about 400 controllers; by January we had 220, but only 54 controllers required exceptions (several of them owned by us, to run our tests and canaries).\n\n![Indeed - Jenkins Controller Count graph](https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1750099357/Blog/Content%20Images/Blog/Content%20Images/image2_aHR0cHM6_1750099357392.png)\n\nWe had a manageable list of around 50 teams we divided among our team and started doing outreach to understand how each team was progressing with the migration. We spent January and February discovering that some teams planned to finish their migration without our help before February 28 others were planning to deprecate their projects before then, and a very small number were very worried they wouldn't make it.\n\nWe were able to work with this smaller set of teams and provide them with “white-glove” service. We still explained that while we lacked the expertise necessary to do the migration for them, we could partner with a subject matter expert from their team. For some projects, we wrote and they reviewed; for others, they wrote and we reviewed. In the end, all of our work paid off and we turned off Jenkins on the very day we had announced 8 months earlier.\n\n## The results: Enhanced CI efficiency and user satisfaction\n\nAt its peak, our Jenkins CI platform ran over 14,000 pipelines per day and serviced our thousands of projects. Today, our GitLab CI platform has run over 40,000 pipelines in a single day and regularly runs over 25,000 per day. The incremental cost of each job of each pipeline is similar to Jenkins, but without the overhead of hardware to run the controllers. Additionally, these controllers served as single points of failure and scaling limiters that forced us to artificially divide our platform into segments. While an apples-to-apples comparison is difficult, we find that with this overhead gone our CI hardware costs are 10-20% lower. Additionally, the support burden of GitLab CI is lower since the application automatically scales in the cloud, has cross-availability-zone resiliency, and the templating language has excellent public documentation available.\n\nA benefit just as important, if not moreso, is that now we are at over 70% adoption of our golden paths. This means that we can roll out an improvement and over 5,000 projects at Indeed will benefit immediately with no action required on their part. This has enabled us to move some jobs to more cost-effective ARM64 instances, keep users' build images updated more easily, and better manage other cost saving opportunities. Most importantly, our users are happier with the new platform.\n\n__About the author:__\n*Carl Myers lives in Sacramento, CA, and is the manager of the CI Platform team at Indeed. Carl has spent his nearly two-decade career dedicated to building internal tools and developer platforms that delight and empower engineers at companies large and small.*\n\n**Acknowledgements:**\n*This migration would not have been possible without the tireless efforts of Tron Nedelea, Eddie Huang, Vivek Nynaru, Carlos Gonzalez, Lane Van Elderen, and the rest of the CI Platform team. The team also especially appreciates the leadership of Deepak Bitragunta, and Irina Tyree for helping secure buy-in, resources and company wide alignment throughout this long project. Finally, our thanks go out to everyone across Indeed who contributed code, feedback, bug reports, and helped migrate projects.*\n\n**This is an edited version of the article [How Indeed Replaced Its CI Platform with Gitlab CI](https://engineering.indeedblog.com/blog/2024/08/indeed-gitlab-ci-migration/), originally published on the Indeed engineering blog.**",[23,24,25,26],"customers","CI/CD","user stories","DevSecOps platform","yml",{},"/en-us/blog/how-indeed-transformed-its-ci-platform-with-gitlab",{"title":15,"description":16,"ogTitle":15,"ogDescription":16,"noIndex":31,"ogImage":19,"ogUrl":32,"ogSiteName":33,"ogType":34,"canonicalUrls":32},false,"https://about.gitlab.com/blog/how-indeed-transformed-its-ci-platform-with-gitlab","https://about.gitlab.com","article","en-us/blog/how-indeed-transformed-its-ci-platform-with-gitlab",[23,37,38,39],"cicd","user-stories","devsecops-platform","9fNghBq_pvEQ-9UxkbC_WBD3CgoyiUqPYWhChzk_Xjg",{"data":42},{"logo":43,"freeTrial":48,"sales":53,"login":58,"items":63,"search":370,"minimal":401,"duo":420,"pricingDeployment":430},{"config":44},{"href":45,"dataGaName":46,"dataGaLocation":47},"/","gitlab logo","header",{"text":49,"config":50},"Get free trial",{"href":51,"dataGaName":52,"dataGaLocation":47},"https://gitlab.com/-/trial_registrations/new?glm_source=about.gitlab.com&glm_content=default-saas-trial/","free trial",{"text":54,"config":55},"Talk to sales",{"href":56,"dataGaName":57,"dataGaLocation":47},"/sales/","sales",{"text":59,"config":60},"Sign in",{"href":61,"dataGaName":62,"dataGaLocation":47},"https://gitlab.com/users/sign_in/","sign in",[64,91,185,190,291,351],{"text":65,"config":66,"cards":68},"Platform",{"dataNavLevelOne":67},"platform",[69,75,83],{"title":65,"description":70,"link":71},"The intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps",{"text":72,"config":73},"Explore our Platform",{"href":74,"dataGaName":67,"dataGaLocation":47},"/platform/",{"title":76,"description":77,"link":78},"GitLab Duo Agent Platform","Agentic AI for the entire software lifecycle",{"text":79,"config":80},"Meet GitLab Duo",{"href":81,"dataGaName":82,"dataGaLocation":47},"/gitlab-duo-agent-platform/","gitlab duo agent platform",{"title":84,"description":85,"link":86},"Why GitLab","See the top reasons enterprises choose GitLab",{"text":87,"config":88},"Learn more",{"href":89,"dataGaName":90,"dataGaLocation":47},"/why-gitlab/","why gitlab",{"text":92,"left":12,"config":93,"link":95,"lists":99,"footer":167},"Product",{"dataNavLevelOne":94},"solutions",{"text":96,"config":97},"View all Solutions",{"href":98,"dataGaName":94,"dataGaLocation":47},"/solutions/",[100,123,146],{"title":101,"description":102,"link":103,"items":108},"Automation","CI/CD and automation to accelerate deployment",{"config":104},{"icon":105,"href":106,"dataGaName":107,"dataGaLocation":47},"AutomatedCodeAlt","/solutions/delivery-automation/","automated software delivery",[109,112,115,119],{"text":24,"config":110},{"href":111,"dataGaLocation":47,"dataGaName":24},"/solutions/continuous-integration/",{"text":76,"config":113},{"href":81,"dataGaLocation":47,"dataGaName":114},"gitlab duo agent platform - product menu",{"text":116,"config":117},"Source Code Management",{"href":118,"dataGaLocation":47,"dataGaName":116},"/solutions/source-code-management/",{"text":120,"config":121},"Automated Software Delivery",{"href":106,"dataGaLocation":47,"dataGaName":122},"Automated software delivery",{"title":124,"description":125,"link":126,"items":131},"Security","Deliver code faster without compromising security",{"config":127},{"href":128,"dataGaName":129,"dataGaLocation":47,"icon":130},"/solutions/application-security-testing/","security and compliance","ShieldCheckLight",[132,136,141],{"text":133,"config":134},"Application Security Testing",{"href":128,"dataGaName":135,"dataGaLocation":47},"Application security testing",{"text":137,"config":138},"Software Supply Chain Security",{"href":139,"dataGaLocation":47,"dataGaName":140},"/solutions/supply-chain/","Software supply chain security",{"text":142,"config":143},"Software Compliance",{"href":144,"dataGaName":145,"dataGaLocation":47},"/solutions/software-compliance/","software compliance",{"title":147,"link":148,"items":153},"Measurement",{"config":149},{"icon":150,"href":151,"dataGaName":152,"dataGaLocation":47},"DigitalTransformation","/solutions/visibility-measurement/","visibility and measurement",[154,158,162],{"text":155,"config":156},"Visibility & Measurement",{"href":151,"dataGaLocation":47,"dataGaName":157},"Visibility and Measurement",{"text":159,"config":160},"Value Stream Management",{"href":161,"dataGaLocation":47,"dataGaName":159},"/solutions/value-stream-management/",{"text":163,"config":164},"Analytics & Insights",{"href":165,"dataGaLocation":47,"dataGaName":166},"/solutions/analytics-and-insights/","Analytics and insights",{"title":168,"items":169},"GitLab for",[170,175,180],{"text":171,"config":172},"Enterprise",{"href":173,"dataGaLocation":47,"dataGaName":174},"/enterprise/","enterprise",{"text":176,"config":177},"Small Business",{"href":178,"dataGaLocation":47,"dataGaName":179},"/small-business/","small business",{"text":181,"config":182},"Public Sector",{"href":183,"dataGaLocation":47,"dataGaName":184},"/solutions/public-sector/","public sector",{"text":186,"config":187},"Pricing",{"href":188,"dataGaName":189,"dataGaLocation":47,"dataNavLevelOne":189},"/pricing/","pricing",{"text":191,"config":192,"link":194,"lists":198,"feature":278},"Resources",{"dataNavLevelOne":193},"resources",{"text":195,"config":196},"View all resources",{"href":197,"dataGaName":193,"dataGaLocation":47},"/resources/",[199,232,250],{"title":200,"items":201},"Getting started",[202,207,212,217,222,227],{"text":203,"config":204},"Install",{"href":205,"dataGaName":206,"dataGaLocation":47},"/install/","install",{"text":208,"config":209},"Quick start guides",{"href":210,"dataGaName":211,"dataGaLocation":47},"/get-started/","quick setup checklists",{"text":213,"config":214},"Learn",{"href":215,"dataGaLocation":47,"dataGaName":216},"https://university.gitlab.com/","learn",{"text":218,"config":219},"Product documentation",{"href":220,"dataGaName":221,"dataGaLocation":47},"https://docs.gitlab.com/","product documentation",{"text":223,"config":224},"Best practice videos",{"href":225,"dataGaName":226,"dataGaLocation":47},"/getting-started-videos/","best practice videos",{"text":228,"config":229},"Integrations",{"href":230,"dataGaName":231,"dataGaLocation":47},"/integrations/","integrations",{"title":233,"items":234},"Discover",[235,240,245],{"text":236,"config":237},"Customer success stories",{"href":238,"dataGaName":239,"dataGaLocation":47},"/customers/","customer success stories",{"text":241,"config":242},"Blog",{"href":243,"dataGaName":244,"dataGaLocation":47},"/blog/","blog",{"text":246,"config":247},"Remote",{"href":248,"dataGaName":249,"dataGaLocation":47},"https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/company/culture/all-remote/","remote",{"title":251,"items":252},"Connect",[253,258,263,268,273],{"text":254,"config":255},"GitLab Services",{"href":256,"dataGaName":257,"dataGaLocation":47},"/services/","services",{"text":259,"config":260},"Community",{"href":261,"dataGaName":262,"dataGaLocation":47},"/community/","community",{"text":264,"config":265},"Forum",{"href":266,"dataGaName":267,"dataGaLocation":47},"https://forum.gitlab.com/","forum",{"text":269,"config":270},"Events",{"href":271,"dataGaName":272,"dataGaLocation":47},"/events/","events",{"text":274,"config":275},"Partners",{"href":276,"dataGaName":277,"dataGaLocation":47},"/partners/","partners",{"backgroundColor":279,"textColor":280,"text":281,"image":282,"link":286},"#2f2a6b","#fff","Insights for the future of software development",{"altText":283,"config":284},"the source promo card",{"src":285},"https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1758208064/dzl0dbift9xdizyelkk4.svg",{"text":287,"config":288},"Read the latest",{"href":289,"dataGaName":290,"dataGaLocation":47},"/the-source/","the source",{"text":292,"config":293,"lists":295},"Company",{"dataNavLevelOne":294},"company",[296],{"items":297},[298,303,309,311,316,321,326,331,336,341,346],{"text":299,"config":300},"About",{"href":301,"dataGaName":302,"dataGaLocation":47},"/company/","about",{"text":304,"config":305,"footerGa":308},"Jobs",{"href":306,"dataGaName":307,"dataGaLocation":47},"/jobs/","jobs",{"dataGaName":307},{"text":269,"config":310},{"href":271,"dataGaName":272,"dataGaLocation":47},{"text":312,"config":313},"Leadership",{"href":314,"dataGaName":315,"dataGaLocation":47},"/company/team/e-group/","leadership",{"text":317,"config":318},"Team",{"href":319,"dataGaName":320,"dataGaLocation":47},"/company/team/","team",{"text":322,"config":323},"Handbook",{"href":324,"dataGaName":325,"dataGaLocation":47},"https://handbook.gitlab.com/","handbook",{"text":327,"config":328},"Investor relations",{"href":329,"dataGaName":330,"dataGaLocation":47},"https://ir.gitlab.com/","investor relations",{"text":332,"config":333},"Trust Center",{"href":334,"dataGaName":335,"dataGaLocation":47},"/security/","trust center",{"text":337,"config":338},"AI Transparency Center",{"href":339,"dataGaName":340,"dataGaLocation":47},"/ai-transparency-center/","ai transparency center",{"text":342,"config":343},"Newsletter",{"href":344,"dataGaName":345,"dataGaLocation":47},"/company/contact/#contact-forms","newsletter",{"text":347,"config":348},"Press",{"href":349,"dataGaName":350,"dataGaLocation":47},"/press/","press",{"text":352,"config":353,"lists":354},"Contact us",{"dataNavLevelOne":294},[355],{"items":356},[357,360,365],{"text":54,"config":358},{"href":56,"dataGaName":359,"dataGaLocation":47},"talk to sales",{"text":361,"config":362},"Support portal",{"href":363,"dataGaName":364,"dataGaLocation":47},"https://support.gitlab.com","support portal",{"text":366,"config":367},"Customer portal",{"href":368,"dataGaName":369,"dataGaLocation":47},"https://customers.gitlab.com/customers/sign_in/","customer portal",{"close":371,"login":372,"suggestions":379},"Close",{"text":373,"link":374},"To search repositories and projects, login to",{"text":375,"config":376},"gitlab.com",{"href":61,"dataGaName":377,"dataGaLocation":378},"search login","search",{"text":380,"default":381},"Suggestions",[382,384,388,390,394,398],{"text":76,"config":383},{"href":81,"dataGaName":76,"dataGaLocation":378},{"text":385,"config":386},"Code Suggestions (AI)",{"href":387,"dataGaName":385,"dataGaLocation":378},"/solutions/code-suggestions/",{"text":24,"config":389},{"href":111,"dataGaName":24,"dataGaLocation":378},{"text":391,"config":392},"GitLab on AWS",{"href":393,"dataGaName":391,"dataGaLocation":378},"/partners/technology-partners/aws/",{"text":395,"config":396},"GitLab on Google Cloud",{"href":397,"dataGaName":395,"dataGaLocation":378},"/partners/technology-partners/google-cloud-platform/",{"text":399,"config":400},"Why GitLab?",{"href":89,"dataGaName":399,"dataGaLocation":378},{"freeTrial":402,"mobileIcon":407,"desktopIcon":412,"secondaryButton":415},{"text":403,"config":404},"Start free trial",{"href":405,"dataGaName":52,"dataGaLocation":406},"https://gitlab.com/-/trials/new/","nav",{"altText":408,"config":409},"Gitlab Icon",{"src":410,"dataGaName":411,"dataGaLocation":406},"https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1758203874/jypbw1jx72aexsoohd7x.svg","gitlab icon",{"altText":408,"config":413},{"src":414,"dataGaName":411,"dataGaLocation":406},"https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1758203875/gs4c8p8opsgvflgkswz9.svg",{"text":416,"config":417},"Get Started",{"href":418,"dataGaName":419,"dataGaLocation":406},"https://gitlab.com/-/trial_registrations/new?glm_source=about.gitlab.com/compare/gitlab-vs-github/","get started",{"freeTrial":421,"mobileIcon":426,"desktopIcon":428},{"text":422,"config":423},"Learn more about GitLab Duo",{"href":424,"dataGaName":425,"dataGaLocation":406},"/gitlab-duo/","gitlab duo",{"altText":408,"config":427},{"src":410,"dataGaName":411,"dataGaLocation":406},{"altText":408,"config":429},{"src":414,"dataGaName":411,"dataGaLocation":406},{"freeTrial":431,"mobileIcon":436,"desktopIcon":438},{"text":432,"config":433},"Back to pricing",{"href":188,"dataGaName":434,"dataGaLocation":406,"icon":435},"back to pricing","GoBack",{"altText":408,"config":437},{"src":410,"dataGaName":411,"dataGaLocation":406},{"altText":408,"config":439},{"src":414,"dataGaName":411,"dataGaLocation":406},{"title":441,"button":442,"config":447},"See how agentic AI transforms software delivery",{"text":443,"config":444},"Watch GitLab Transcend now",{"href":445,"dataGaName":446,"dataGaLocation":47},"/events/transcend/virtual/","transcend event",{"layout":448,"icon":449},"release","AiStar",{"data":451},{"text":452,"source":453,"edit":459,"contribute":464,"config":469,"items":474,"minimal":679},"Git is a trademark of Software Freedom Conservancy and our use of 'GitLab' is under license",{"text":454,"config":455},"View page source",{"href":456,"dataGaName":457,"dataGaLocation":458},"https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/marketing/digital-experience/about-gitlab-com/","page source","footer",{"text":460,"config":461},"Edit this page",{"href":462,"dataGaName":463,"dataGaLocation":458},"https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/marketing/digital-experience/about-gitlab-com/-/blob/main/content/","web ide",{"text":465,"config":466},"Please contribute",{"href":467,"dataGaName":468,"dataGaLocation":458},"https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/marketing/digital-experience/about-gitlab-com/-/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md/","please contribute",{"twitter":470,"facebook":471,"youtube":472,"linkedin":473},"https://twitter.com/gitlab","https://www.facebook.com/gitlab","https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnMGQ8QHMAnVIsI3xJrihhg","https://www.linkedin.com/company/gitlab-com",[475,522,574,618,645],{"title":186,"links":476,"subMenu":491},[477,481,486],{"text":478,"config":479},"View plans",{"href":188,"dataGaName":480,"dataGaLocation":458},"view plans",{"text":482,"config":483},"Why Premium?",{"href":484,"dataGaName":485,"dataGaLocation":458},"/pricing/premium/","why premium",{"text":487,"config":488},"Why Ultimate?",{"href":489,"dataGaName":490,"dataGaLocation":458},"/pricing/ultimate/","why ultimate",[492],{"title":493,"links":494},"Contact Us",[495,498,500,502,507,512,517],{"text":496,"config":497},"Contact sales",{"href":56,"dataGaName":57,"dataGaLocation":458},{"text":361,"config":499},{"href":363,"dataGaName":364,"dataGaLocation":458},{"text":366,"config":501},{"href":368,"dataGaName":369,"dataGaLocation":458},{"text":503,"config":504},"Status",{"href":505,"dataGaName":506,"dataGaLocation":458},"https://status.gitlab.com/","status",{"text":508,"config":509},"Terms of use",{"href":510,"dataGaName":511,"dataGaLocation":458},"/terms/","terms of use",{"text":513,"config":514},"Privacy statement",{"href":515,"dataGaName":516,"dataGaLocation":458},"/privacy/","privacy statement",{"text":518,"config":519},"Cookie preferences",{"dataGaName":520,"dataGaLocation":458,"id":521,"isOneTrustButton":12},"cookie preferences","ot-sdk-btn",{"title":92,"links":523,"subMenu":531},[524,527],{"text":26,"config":525},{"href":74,"dataGaName":526,"dataGaLocation":458},"devsecops platform",{"text":528,"config":529},"AI-Assisted Development",{"href":424,"dataGaName":530,"dataGaLocation":458},"ai-assisted development",[532],{"title":533,"links":534},"Topics",[535,539,544,549,554,559,564,569],{"text":536,"config":537},"CICD",{"href":538,"dataGaName":37,"dataGaLocation":458},"/topics/ci-cd/",{"text":540,"config":541},"GitOps",{"href":542,"dataGaName":543,"dataGaLocation":458},"/topics/gitops/","gitops",{"text":545,"config":546},"DevOps",{"href":547,"dataGaName":548,"dataGaLocation":458},"/topics/devops/","devops",{"text":550,"config":551},"Version Control",{"href":552,"dataGaName":553,"dataGaLocation":458},"/topics/version-control/","version control",{"text":555,"config":556},"DevSecOps",{"href":557,"dataGaName":558,"dataGaLocation":458},"/topics/devsecops/","devsecops",{"text":560,"config":561},"Cloud Native",{"href":562,"dataGaName":563,"dataGaLocation":458},"/topics/cloud-native/","cloud native",{"text":565,"config":566},"AI for Coding",{"href":567,"dataGaName":568,"dataGaLocation":458},"/topics/devops/ai-for-coding/","ai for coding",{"text":570,"config":571},"Agentic AI",{"href":572,"dataGaName":573,"dataGaLocation":458},"/topics/agentic-ai/","agentic ai",{"title":575,"links":576},"Solutions",[577,579,581,586,590,593,597,600,602,605,608,613],{"text":133,"config":578},{"href":128,"dataGaName":133,"dataGaLocation":458},{"text":122,"config":580},{"href":106,"dataGaName":107,"dataGaLocation":458},{"text":582,"config":583},"Agile development",{"href":584,"dataGaName":585,"dataGaLocation":458},"/solutions/agile-delivery/","agile delivery",{"text":587,"config":588},"SCM",{"href":118,"dataGaName":589,"dataGaLocation":458},"source code management",{"text":536,"config":591},{"href":111,"dataGaName":592,"dataGaLocation":458},"continuous integration & delivery",{"text":594,"config":595},"Value stream management",{"href":161,"dataGaName":596,"dataGaLocation":458},"value stream management",{"text":540,"config":598},{"href":599,"dataGaName":543,"dataGaLocation":458},"/solutions/gitops/",{"text":171,"config":601},{"href":173,"dataGaName":174,"dataGaLocation":458},{"text":603,"config":604},"Small business",{"href":178,"dataGaName":179,"dataGaLocation":458},{"text":606,"config":607},"Public sector",{"href":183,"dataGaName":184,"dataGaLocation":458},{"text":609,"config":610},"Education",{"href":611,"dataGaName":612,"dataGaLocation":458},"/solutions/education/","education",{"text":614,"config":615},"Financial services",{"href":616,"dataGaName":617,"dataGaLocation":458},"/solutions/finance/","financial services",{"title":191,"links":619},[620,622,624,626,629,631,633,635,637,639,641,643],{"text":203,"config":621},{"href":205,"dataGaName":206,"dataGaLocation":458},{"text":208,"config":623},{"href":210,"dataGaName":211,"dataGaLocation":458},{"text":213,"config":625},{"href":215,"dataGaName":216,"dataGaLocation":458},{"text":218,"config":627},{"href":220,"dataGaName":628,"dataGaLocation":458},"docs",{"text":241,"config":630},{"href":243,"dataGaName":244,"dataGaLocation":458},{"text":236,"config":632},{"href":238,"dataGaName":239,"dataGaLocation":458},{"text":246,"config":634},{"href":248,"dataGaName":249,"dataGaLocation":458},{"text":254,"config":636},{"href":256,"dataGaName":257,"dataGaLocation":458},{"text":259,"config":638},{"href":261,"dataGaName":262,"dataGaLocation":458},{"text":264,"config":640},{"href":266,"dataGaName":267,"dataGaLocation":458},{"text":269,"config":642},{"href":271,"dataGaName":272,"dataGaLocation":458},{"text":274,"config":644},{"href":276,"dataGaName":277,"dataGaLocation":458},{"title":292,"links":646},[647,649,651,653,655,657,659,663,668,670,672,674],{"text":299,"config":648},{"href":301,"dataGaName":294,"dataGaLocation":458},{"text":304,"config":650},{"href":306,"dataGaName":307,"dataGaLocation":458},{"text":312,"config":652},{"href":314,"dataGaName":315,"dataGaLocation":458},{"text":317,"config":654},{"href":319,"dataGaName":320,"dataGaLocation":458},{"text":322,"config":656},{"href":324,"dataGaName":325,"dataGaLocation":458},{"text":327,"config":658},{"href":329,"dataGaName":330,"dataGaLocation":458},{"text":660,"config":661},"Sustainability",{"href":662,"dataGaName":660,"dataGaLocation":458},"/sustainability/",{"text":664,"config":665},"Diversity, inclusion and belonging (DIB)",{"href":666,"dataGaName":667,"dataGaLocation":458},"/diversity-inclusion-belonging/","Diversity, inclusion and belonging",{"text":332,"config":669},{"href":334,"dataGaName":335,"dataGaLocation":458},{"text":342,"config":671},{"href":344,"dataGaName":345,"dataGaLocation":458},{"text":347,"config":673},{"href":349,"dataGaName":350,"dataGaLocation":458},{"text":675,"config":676},"Modern Slavery Transparency Statement",{"href":677,"dataGaName":678,"dataGaLocation":458},"https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/legal/modern-slavery-act-transparency-statement/","modern slavery transparency statement",{"items":680},[681,684,687],{"text":682,"config":683},"Terms",{"href":510,"dataGaName":511,"dataGaLocation":458},{"text":685,"config":686},"Cookies",{"dataGaName":520,"dataGaLocation":458,"id":521,"isOneTrustButton":12},{"text":688,"config":689},"Privacy",{"href":515,"dataGaName":516,"dataGaLocation":458},[691],{"id":692,"title":18,"body":8,"config":693,"content":695,"description":8,"extension":27,"meta":700,"navigation":12,"path":701,"seo":702,"stem":703,"__hash__":704},"blogAuthors/en-us/blog/authors/carl-myers.yml",{"template":694},"BlogAuthor",{"role":696,"name":18,"config":697},"Manager, CI Platform team, Indeed",{"headshot":698,"ctfId":699},"https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749665044/Blog/Author%20Headshots/image1.jpg","7KelbQ0LsGSGf4TpT0qAlp",{},"/en-us/blog/authors/carl-myers",{},"en-us/blog/authors/carl-myers","KR8A3urTNz09sPXWov7bPjlHz2XZs1obH5SszV-gzGE",[706,720,732],{"content":707,"config":718},{"title":708,"description":709,"authors":710,"heroImage":712,"date":713,"body":714,"category":9,"tags":715},"The Co-Create Program: How customers are collaborating to build GitLab","Learn how organizations like Thales, Scania, and Kitware are partnering with GitLab engineers to contribute meaningful features that benefit the entire community.",[711],"Fatima Sarah Khalid","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749659756/Blog/Hero%20Images/REFERENCE_-_display_preview_for_blog_images.png","2025-01-30","This past year, over 800 community members have made more than 3,000 contributions to GitLab. These contributors include team members from global organizations like Thales, Scania, and Kitware, who are helping shape GitLab's future through the [Co-Create Program](https://about.gitlab.com/community/co-create/) — GitLab's collaborative development program where customers work directly with GitLab engineers to contribute meaningful features to the platform.\n\nThrough workshops, pair programming sessions, and ongoing support, program participants get hands-on experience with GitLab's architecture and codebase while solving issues or improving existing features.\n\n\"Our experience with the Co-Create Program has been incredible,\" explains Sébastien Lejeune, open source advocate at Thales. \"It only took two months between discussing our contribution with a GitLab Contributor Success Engineer and getting it live in the GitLab release.\"\n\nIn this post, we'll explore how customers have leveraged the Co-Create Program to turn their ideas into code, learning and contributing along the way.\n\n## The Co-Create experience\n[The GitLab Development Kit (GDK)](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-development-kit) helps contributors get started developing on GitLab. \"The advice I would give new contributors is to remember that you can't break anything with the GDK,\" says Hook. \"If you make a change and it doesn't work, you can undo it or start again. The beauty of GDK is that you can tinker, test, and learn without worrying about the environment.\"\n\nEach participating organization in the Co-Create Program receives support throughout their contribution journey:\n\n- __Technical onboarding workshop__: A dedicated session to set up the GitLab Development Kit (GDK) and understand GitLab's architecture\n- __1:1 engineering support__: Access to GitLab engineers for pair programming and technical guidance\n- __Architecture deep dives__: Focused sessions on specific GitLab components relevant to the issue the organization is contributing to\n- __Code review support__: Detailed feedback and guidance through the merge request process\n- __Regular check-ins__: Ongoing collaboration to ensure progress and address any challenges\n\nThis structure ensures that teams can contribute effectively, regardless of their prior experience with GitLab's codebase or the Ruby/Go programming language. As John Parent from Kitware notes, \"If you've never seen or worked with GitLab before, you're staring at a sophisticated architecture and so much code across different projects. The Co-Create Program helps distill what would take weeks of internal training into a targeted crash course.\"\n\nThe result is a program that not only helps deliver new features but also builds lasting relationships between GitLab and its user community. \"It's inspiring for our engineers to see the passion our customers bring to contributing to and building GitLab together,\" shares Shekhar Patnaik, principal engineer at GitLab. \"Customers get to see the 'GitLab way,' and engineers get to witness their commitment to shaping the future of GitLab.\"\n\n## Enhancing project UX with Thales\nWhen Thales identified opportunities to improve GitLab's empty project UI, they didn't just file a feature request — they built the solution themselves. Their contributions focused on streamlining the new project setup experience by simplifying SSH/HTTPS configuration with a tabbed interface and adding copy/paste functionality for the code snippets. These changes had a significant impact on developer workflows.\n\nThe team's impact extended beyond the UX improvements. Quentin Michaud, PhD fellow for cloud applications on the edge at Thales, contributed to improving the GitLab Development Kit (GDK). As a package maintainer for Arch Linux, Michaud's expertise helped improve GDK's documentation and support its containerization efforts, making it easier for future contributors to get started.\n\n\"My open source experience helped me troubleshoot GDK's support for Linux distros,” says Michaud. “While improving package versioning documentation, I saw that GitLab's Contributor Success team was also working to set up GDK into a container. Seeing our efforts converge was a great moment for me — it showed how open source collaboration can help build better solutions.\"\n\nThe positive experience for the Thales team means that Lejeune now uses the Co-Create Program as \"a powerful example to show our managers the return on investment from open source contributions.\"\n\n## Advancing package support with Scania\nWhen Scania needed advanced package support in GitLab, they saw an opportunity to contribute and build it themselves. \n\n\"As long-time GitLab users who actively promote open source within our organization, the Co-Create Program gave us a meaningful way to contribute directly to open source,\" shares Puttaraju Venugopal Hassan, solution architect at Scania.\n\nThe team started with smaller changes to familiarize themselves with the codebase and review process, then progressed to larger features. \"One of the most rewarding aspects of the Co-Create Program has been looking back at the full, end-to-end process and seeing how far we've come,\" reflects Océane Legrand, software developer at Scania. \"We started with discovery and smaller changes, but we took on larger tasks over time. It's great to see that progression.\" \n\nTheir contributions include bug fixes for the package registry and efforts to enhance the Conan package registry feature set, bringing it closer to general availability (GA) readiness while implementing Conan version 2 support. Their work and collaboration with GitLab demonstrates how the Co-Create Program can drive significant improvements to GitLab’s package registry capabilities.\n\n\"From the start, our experience with the Co-Create Program was very organized. We had training sessions that guided us through everything we needed to contribute. One-on-one sessions with a GitLab engineer also gave us an in-depth look at GitLab’s package architecture, which made the contribution process much smoother,\" said Juan Pablo Gonzalez, software developer at Scania. \n\nThe impact of the program goes beyond code — program participants are also building valuable skills as a direct result of their contributions. In [the GitLab 17.8 release](https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2025/01/16/gitlab-17-8-released/#mvp), both Legrand and Gonzalez were recognized as GitLab MVPs. Legrand talked about how the work she's doing in open source impacts both GitLab and Scania, including building new skills for her and her team: \"Contributing through the Co-Create Program has given me new skills, like experience with Ruby and background migrations. When my team at Scania faced an issue during an upgrade, I was able to help troubleshoot because I'd already encountered it through the Co-Create Program.\"\n\n## Optimizing authentication for high-performance computing with Kitware\nKitware brought specialized expertise from their work with national laboratories to improve GitLab's authentication framework. Their contributions included adding support for the OAuth2 device authorization grant flow in GitLab, as well as implementing new database tables, controllers, views, and documentation. This contribution enhances GitLab's authentication options, making it more versatile for devices without browsers or with limited input capabilities.\n\n\"The Co-Create Program is the most efficient and effective way to contribute to GitLab as an external contributor,\" shares John Parent, R&D engineer at Kitware. \"Through developer pairing sessions, we found better implementations that we might have missed working alone.\"\n\nAs a long-time open source contributor, Kitware particularly appreciated GitLab's approach to development. \"I assumed GitLab wouldn't rely on out-of-the-box solutions at its scale, but seeing them incorporate a Ruby dependency instead of building a custom in-house solution was great,” says Parent. “Coming from the C++ world, where package managers are rare, it was refreshing to see this approach and how straightforward it could be.\"\n\n## Building better together: Benefits of Co-Create\nThe Co-Create Program creates value that flows both ways. \"The program bridges a gap between us as GitLab engineers and our customers,\" explains Imre Farkas, staff backend engineer at GitLab. \"As we work with them, we hear their day-to-day challenges, the parts of GitLab they rely on, and where improvements can be made. It's great to see how enthusiastic they are about getting involved in building GitLab with us.\"\n\nThis collaborative approach also accelerates GitLab's development. As Shekhar Patnaik, principal engineer at GitLab, observes: \"Through Co-Create, our customers are helping us move our roadmap forward. Their contributions allow us to deliver critical features faster, benefitting our entire user base. As the program scales, there's a real potential to accelerate development on our most impactful features by working alongside the very people who rely on them.\"\n\n## Get started with Co-Create\nReady to turn your feature requests into reality? Whether you're looking to enhance GitLab's UI like Thales, improve package support like Scania, or optimize authentication like Kitware, the Co-Create Program welcomes organizations who want to actively shape GitLab's future while building valuable open source experience.\n\nContact your GitLab representative to learn more about participating in the Co-Create Program, or visit our [Co-Create page](https://about.gitlab.com/community/co-create/) for more information.\n",[716,717,23],"contributors","open source",{"slug":719,"featured":12,"template":13},"the-co-create-program-how-customers-are-collaborating-to-build-gitlab",{"content":721,"config":730},{"title":722,"description":723,"authors":724,"heroImage":712,"date":726,"body":727,"category":9,"tags":728},"Kingfisher transforming the developer experience with GitLab","Learn how the international company focuses on DevSecOps, including automation, to reduce complexity in workflows for better efficiency.",[725],"Sharon Gaudin","2024-11-12","Kingfisher plc, an international home improvement company, has leaned into GitLab’s end-to-end platform to help it build a DevSecOps foundation that is revolutionizing its developer experience. And the company plans to continue that improvement by increasing its use of platform features, focusing on security, simplifying its toolchain, and increasing the use of automation.\n\n> \u003Cimg align=\"left\" width=\"200\" height=\"200\" hspace=\"5\" vspace=\"5\" alt=\"Chintan Parmar\" src=\"https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1752176076/Blog/ro7u8p695zw9fllbk4j5.png\" style=\"float: left; margin-right: 25px;\"> “The whole point of this is to reduce friction for our engineers, taking away a lot of the complexity in their workflow, and bringing in best practices and governance,” says Chintan Parmar, site reliability engineering manager at Kingfisher. “In terms of what we've done and what we're doing at the moment, it really is about building a foundation in terms of CI/CD and changing the way we deploy to bring in consistency and improve the developer experience.”\n\nParmar talked about his team and their efforts during the [GitLab DevSecOps World Tour event](https://about.gitlab.com/events/epic-conference/) in London last month. In an on-stage interview with Sherrod Patching, vice president of Customer Success Management at GitLab, he laid out Kingfisher’s journey with the platform, which is enabling its teams, while also making it easier and faster to move software updates and new projects from ideation to deployment.\n\n[Kingfisher](https://www.kingfisher.com/en/index.html) is a parent company with more than 2,000 stores in eight countries across Europe. Listed on the London Stock Exchange and part of the Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) 100 Index, the group reported £13 billion in total revenue in FY 2023/24. Its brands include B&Q, Screwfix, Castorama, and Brico Depot.\n\nThe company first adopted GitLab in 2016, using a free starter license, and then moved to Premium in 2020. In that time, it also has moved from on-premise to a cloud environment, started using shared GitLab runners and source code management, and began building out a CI/CD library that gives team members easy access to standardized and reusable components for typical pipeline stages, such as build, deploy, and test.\n\n## Tracking metrics that execs care about\n\nKingfisher also is tracking metrics, like deployment frequency, lead time to change, and change failure rates, with GitLab. And teams are analyzing value streams, mapping workflows, and finding bottlenecks. All of those metrics are being translated into data that company leaders can sink their teeth into.\n\n“Execs may not care about whether a merge request has been waiting 15 or 20 minutes, but they do care about how we translate that time value into dollars or pounds,” says Parmar, who used GitLab when he previously worked at [Dunelm Group, plc,](https://about.gitlab.com/customers/dunelm/) another major UK-based retailer. “Kingfisher is a very data-driven organization. We are looking to overlay these metrics to see where we can continue to improve our developer experience, eliminating slowdowns and manual tasks, while increasing automation.”\n\nWhile on-stage, Parmar made it clear that all the changes being made are aimed at improving software development and deployment. However, it’s equally paramount to making team members’ jobs easier, giving them more time and autonomy to do the kind of work they enjoy, instead of what can seem like a never-ending stream of repetitive, manual tasks. He noted that the team is so focused on easing workflows and giving engineers more time to be innovative, it has created a “developer experience squad.”\n\n## Putting people first while laying out priorities\n\nSo what’s coming next for Kingfisher and its engineering squads, which have about 600 practitioners?\n\nAccording to Parmar, Kingfisher already has its priorities mapped out. Using GitLab to [move security left](https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/application-security-testing/) is at the top of their list. The group also is focused on continuing to reduce its toolchain, and using automation to increase productivity. And he expects that early in 2025, teams will begin “dabbling” with the artificial intelligence capabilities in [GitLab Duo](https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-duo/), a suite of AI-powered features in the platform that help increase velocity and solve key pain points across the software development lifecycle. Kingfisher will focus on how that can further increase its efficiency and productivity.\n\nTo get all of this done, Parmar says the first step is to ensure that people come first.\n\n“We’re focused on the hearts and minds of our people... and remembering that people can be attached to how they work through pipelines,” he adds. “People have different ways of building their pipelines. We need to understand what they need, what their workflows look like, and then work with them to find the right solution. After, we’ll go back to them with data that shows the improvements worked. So instead of telling them what they need, we find out what that is, and fix what’s slowing them down. That builds a very good rapport with our engineers.”\n\nChanging how a team creates and deploys software is a journey. Parmar suggests that collaboratively taking developers and security teams on that journey, instead of dragging them along, makes a big difference in ease of migration and in easing team members’ user experience.\n\n> Learn [how other GitLab customers use the DevSecOps platform](https://about.gitlab.com/customers/) to gain results for customers.\n",[23,26,555,729],"workflow",{"slug":731,"featured":12,"template":13},"kingfisher-transforming-the-developer-experience-with-gitlab",{"content":733,"config":743},{"title":734,"description":735,"authors":736,"heroImage":738,"date":739,"body":740,"category":9,"tags":741},"Online retailer bol tackles growing compliance needs with GitLab","Learn how GitLab helps the major international company adhere to regulations while increasing development efficiency.",[737],"Julie Griffin","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749665465/Blog/Hero%20Images/blog-image-template-1800x945__15_.png","2024-06-12","[Bol](https://www.bol.com/nl/nl/), which uses GitLab Ultimate, is one of the largest online retailers in the Netherlands and Belgium. The company offers a product range of 38 million items alongside 50,000 sales partners who sell their goods on its marketplace. Bol relies on innovative technology to increase development efficiency, adhere to compliance regulations, and maintain trust across its extensive customer base.\n\nBol equips its teams with the GitLab DevSecOps platform, enabling its developers to quickly and securely ship projects, while saving the team thousands of manual hours on compliance checks.\n\n“GitLab is helping us stay flexible and competitive as we grow, and as the requirements that our software and our developers need to comply with grow,” says Guus Houtzager, engineering manager on bol’s Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment team. “That's the biggest challenge that we had and we tackled it with GitLab.”\n\nHowever, as bol's revenue grew, so did the compliance rules and regulations it had to adhere to. The company needs to continually adapt its software to meet strict, and often updated regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), International Organization for Standardization (ISO) requirements, and the EU Artificial Intelligence Act.\n\nAfter adopting GitLab Community in 2016 and GitLab Premium several years later, bol upgraded to GitLab Ultimate in 2024 to [meet the growing compliance load](https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/application-security-testing/) and help its teams tackle projects faster and more efficiently.\n\n![Guus Houtzager of bol - quote box](https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749675638/Blog/Content%20Images/bol_Blog_-_Guus.png)\n\n## Saving thousands of developer hours per month\n\nGitLab enables bol’s DevSecOps teams to set up policies that automate compliance configurations and checks. This helps them achieve consistency and scalability in their compliance efforts, and reduce the risk of human error. With compliance guardrails in place, its team of 850 developers can focus more of their energy on creating innovative, secure software.\n\n“We bought GitLab Ultimate so we can have compulsory compliance pipelines that ensures our teams are working within compliance regulations from the start,” says Houtzager.\n\nBy allowing developers to focus on coding without the burden of compliance regulations, the bol development team dramatically increased its efficiency.\n\n“This has saved our developers several thousands of hours in total per month,” says Houtzager.\n\nIn addition to time savings, the team is now confident it can handle any compliance roadblocks that come its way.\n\n“We know that GitLab is going to help us with compliance and software security,” says Houtzager. “Even if we get new regulations, we have a toolkit, through GitLab, that enables us to follow and comply with any new regulations. We don't know exactly what will happen, but we know we are in a position to handle whatever comes our way.”\n\n## Shifting left to protect customers and its business\n\nAs a large player in the European retail world, trust is a key pillar of bol’s business model. The company handles a large quantity of personal data, such as addresses and order details. While regulatory fines are a concern, so is maintaining trust with its customer base. That only emphasizes the importance of security.\n\n“Most of the people in the Netherlands and Belgium have bought something from us in the past and people trust us,” says Houtzager. “They trust that we handle their payment details properly. We don't sell your Personal Identifiable Information PII data, and they trust us to keep it safe and secure.”\n\nTo protect customer data and its business, bol shifted security left, enabling developers to find errors and vulnerabilities earlier in the development process. However, shifting left without the right tools in place could lead to developers spending countless hours trying to correct any problems they find.\n\n“If you shift left without also providing teams the tools, support, and processes to make sure that they can do this work in an efficient manner, teams get bogged down in either procedures or manual work,” says Houtzager.\n\nWith GitLab Ultimate, bol is able to set up the layout and permission model to meet the company’s security requirements, giving developers the freedom to quickly build and ship projects while protecting customer and business data. The DevSecOps platform has the added benefit of tracking the changes and fixes that developers make and noting them in compliance records.\n\n## Looking ahead to AI\n\nMoving forward, bol plans to use more GitLab Ultimate features, like cloud integration, and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, along with even more security features.\n\nFrom building secure software faster to improving the developer experience, bol looks forward to one day using AI-powered [GitLab Duo](https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-duo/) to help them scale their software development.\n\n“The situation must be right for us to be able to use it and then we will definitely take a look at how it can help us,” says Houtzager. “We, like everybody else, are looking at where AI can help us to improve situations across the entire software development life cycle. So if someone is building code, how can it help them? If someone is working on other aspects of the process, how can it help them?”\n\n> Read more customer stories on [the GitLab customers page](https://about.gitlab.com/customers/).\n",[24,742,23,26],"security",{"slug":744,"featured":31,"template":13},"online-retailer-bol-tackles-growing-compliance-needs-with-gitlab",{"promotions":746},[747,761,773],{"id":748,"categories":749,"header":751,"text":752,"button":753,"image":758},"ai-modernization",[750],"ai-ml","Is AI achieving its promise at scale?","Quiz will take 5 minutes or less",{"text":754,"config":755},"Get your AI maturity score",{"href":756,"dataGaName":757,"dataGaLocation":244},"/assessments/ai-modernization-assessment/","modernization assessment",{"config":759},{"src":760},"https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1772138786/qix0m7kwnd8x2fh1zq49.png",{"id":762,"categories":763,"header":765,"text":752,"button":766,"image":770},"devops-modernization",[764,558],"product","Are you just managing tools or shipping innovation?",{"text":767,"config":768},"Get your DevOps maturity score",{"href":769,"dataGaName":757,"dataGaLocation":244},"/assessments/devops-modernization-assessment/",{"config":771},{"src":772},"https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1772138785/eg818fmakweyuznttgid.png",{"id":774,"categories":775,"header":776,"text":752,"button":777,"image":781},"security-modernization",[742],"Are you trading speed for security?",{"text":778,"config":779},"Get your security maturity score",{"href":780,"dataGaName":757,"dataGaLocation":244},"/assessments/security-modernization-assessment/",{"config":782},{"src":783},"https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1772138786/p4pbqd9nnjejg5ds6mdk.png",{"header":785,"blurb":786,"button":787,"secondaryButton":792},"Start building faster today","See what your team can do with the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps.\n",{"text":788,"config":789},"Get your free trial",{"href":790,"dataGaName":52,"dataGaLocation":791},"https://gitlab.com/-/trial_registrations/new?glm_content=default-saas-trial&glm_source=about.gitlab.com/","feature",{"text":496,"config":793},{"href":56,"dataGaName":57,"dataGaLocation":791},1772652073129]