The latest release of GitLab introduces over 60 new features, mostly aimed at improving support for DevSecOps at scale and better handling the complexity of automation at scale.
On the DevSecOps front, GitLab new Security Alert Dashboard provides a dashboard for security alerts.
Users can now configure Container Network Policies to send alerts to the security alert dashboard. This is especially useful when traffic must be closely monitored but cannot be blocked entirely without negatively impacting the business.
The Security Alert Dashboard lists all alerts that were triggered based on your threat monitoring policies. Alerts can be in one of four possible statuses: unreviewed, in review, resolved, and dismissed.
The Security Dashboard also monitors coverage-guided fuzz tests of your Python and JavaScript apps. Coverage fuzz testing exercises your apps using random inputs with the goal of making it crash and uncover potential vulnerabilities. Fuzz tested apps are instrumented by GitLab to provide rich debugging information. Besides Python and JavaScript, GitLab also supports fuzz testing for other languages, including C/C++, Go, Rust, Java, and many more.
To simplify maintenance tasks and reduce downtime, GitLab 13.9 offers its new Maintenance Mode. When using this mode, all external operations that change the system state are blocked. That includes PostgreSQL, files, repos, and so on. This will have the effect of quickly draining the pipeline of pending operations, while no new operations will be admitted. This will in turn make maintenance tasks run more quickly, says GitLab.
As mentioned, GitLab 13.9 also brings new automation capabilities, which according to the company will make DevOps promise of "delivering better products, faster" truer. In particular, a new !reference tags can be used in the definition of a CI/CD pipeline to reuse a part of a task configuration.
Additionally, for complex CI/CD pipelines made of multiple files connected using include and extends, it can become hard to keep a full comprehension of what is going on. To mitigate this, GitLab 13.9 makes it possible to merge all pieces of a pipeline together to better understand the overall flow and simplify debugging. Similarly, pipelines that span across multiple projects and pipelines that have child pipelines can now use resource groups to ensure only one deployment pipeline runs at a time, thus removing the risks of concurrent execution. For example, when running a child pipeline, GitLab waits until any already executing pipeline finishes before running the child.
On a related note, GitLab has quickly issued a mainenance 13.9.1 release that fixes a number of bugs and regressions.
GitLab 13.9 includes far more new features than what can be covered here, so make sure you read the official announcement if interested.