GitLab is evolving, where constant research are carried out to improve GitLab into powerful DevOps platform of the future. June-22, 2022 GitLab is moving forward and running on their journey towards the future of DevOps. Thereafter, GitLab announces the release of GitLab 15. Excited and obligated, E-SPIN dedicated this ‘ GitLab 15 Releases and Updates’ post to provide end users with the latest improvements added into GitLab 15.
GitLab introduces their improvements on the platform every month. In regards to this monthly release practice, E-SPIN will continuously reach the end users through this post for each GitLab 15 releases and updates. The details of the latest release and updates are presented in the manner where the latest release is shown at the top of the post and then followed with the previous releases. Feel free to visit this post for the updates and please do not hesitate to contact E-SPIN regarding product and related matter (if any).
Last year, the announcement of the release of GitLab 14 marked their first step in establishing future of DevOps. Now, GitLab made it again! Meet GitLab 15 with various of improvements, breakthroughs and new changes, it is a release that represents GitLab commitment in delivering a one true future of DevOps solution. they officially launched GitLab 15. This release
Features in GitLab 15:
GitLab 15.2 release (2022-Jul-22)
GitLab 15.2 is packed with more than 40 improvement in its release. Some of the highlights are Live preview diagrams in the wiki WYSIWYG editor, Incident timelines, Group and subgroup scan execution policies and Change failure rate chart for visualizing software stability
1. Live preview diagrams in the wiki WYSIWYG editor
Availability – in SaaS GitLab Premium and Ultimate and self-managed GitLab Premium and Ultimate
Capabilities – In GitLab 15.2, wiki’s WYSIWYG editor is included with live rendered preview of your diagram. This allow detect the diagram type and display a preview icon during diagram writing.
2. Merge request reports redesign
Availability – in SaaS GitLab Premium and Ultimate and self-managed GitLab Premium and Ultimate
Capabilities -In this release, the report widgets completely follow design guidelines for layout, hierarchy, and content sections. These improvements make them more consistent, scannable, and utilitarian thus you can find actionable information in each report easily.
3. Enforce IP address restrictions for Git over SSH
Availability – in SaaS GitLab Premium and Ultimate
Capabilities – GitLab 15.2 SaaS Premium and Ultimate are now with SSH that support limiting access to requests from a trusted set of IP addresses.
4. Change failure rate chart for visualizing software stability
Availability – in SaaS GitLab Ultimate and self-managed GitLab Ultimate
Capabilities – This new releases is included with new trend chart for the DORA Change failure rate metric which display percentage of deployments that cause an incident in a production environment. With this addition, now GitLab added the fourth DORA chart available that give insights into value stream velocity and reliability trends.
5. Group and subgroup scan execution policies
Availability – in SaaS GitLab Ultimate and self-managed GitLab Ultimate
Capabilities – This release enable security and compliance teams to apply policies uniformly to all projects by scanning execution policies at the group and subgroup level. This feature is especially helpful to organisations with large numbers of projects.
Get started by asking your group owner to link a security policy project to your group on the Security & Compliance > Policies page.
6. Incident timeline
Availability – in SaaS GitLab Premium and Ultimate and self-managed GitLab Premium and Ultimate
Capabilities – Incident timeline feature provided in this release will help make information capture during an incident, or post incident, easy and efficient. This incident timeline allows you to manually add new timeline events, delete a timeline event, and view the incident timeline in a dedicated tab within an incident issue.
7. Set the image pull policy in pipeline configuration
Availability – in SaaS GitLab Premium and Ultimate and self-managed GitLab Premium and Ultimate
Capabilities – This release allows you to pull policies at the pipeline level which previously only applicable at runner level. You can also choose or select different pull policies for how a GitLab Runner downloads Docker images in CI/CD jobs.
implementation directiveGitLab 15.1 release (2022-Jun-22)
GitLab 15.1 carries more than 30 improvements upon its release. Among the significant improvements are SAML Group Sync, SLSA level 2 build artifact attestation, links to included CI/CD configuration and enhanced visibility into value stream with DORA metrics.
1. Compliance report for individual violation reporting
Availability – in SaaS GitLab Premium and Ultimate and self-managed GitLab Premium and Ultimate
Capabilities
Users can now map a group into their identity provider to a self-managed GitLab group through SAML group links which was previously a privilege features for Gitlab.com. This feature reduces workload for GitLab administrator and allows easier onboarding, the reducing members’ onboarding time.
2. Increased visibility into Value Stream with DORA metrics
Availability – in SaaS GitLab Premium and Ultimate and self-managed GitLab Premium and Ultimate
Capabilities
With the four DORA metrics tiles being added to the Value Stream Analytics dashboard, GitLab 15 users are given the ability to track team performance and value flow from ideation to customer delivery.
Furthermore, the new trend chart for the DORA Time to restore service metric to give insights into software stability and reliability trends. This improvement offers information on the time taken by organisation to recover from production failure.
3. SLSA level 2 build artifact attestation
Availability – in SaaS GitLab Premium and Ultimate and self-managed GitLab Premium and Ultimate
Capabilities
SLSA which stands for Supply-chain Levels for Software Artifacts refers to a security framework to ensure the security and integrity of users’ software supply chain. In this recent release, GitLab Runner, is capable in generating and producing SLSA-2 compliant attestation metadata for build artifacts by default.
The new attestation in GitLab 15 allows users to verify whether the build artifacts have not been altered more easily. The only step needed is to set RUNNER_GENERATE_ARTIFACTS_METADATA = "true" in the .gitlab-ci.yml file.
4. Link to included CI/CD configuration from the pipeline editor
Availability – in SaaS GitLab Premium and Ultimate and self-managed GitLab Premium and Ultimate
Capabilities
GitLab 15 is added with links to all included configuration files and templates to the pipeline editor, enabling the users to easily manage large and complex pipelines as they can access and view all the CI/CD configuration used in the pipeline.
API includes additional detail about who added members
Improved insights discovery in Value Stream Analytics
Retrieve PAT by ID using API
GitLab.com sign-in for GitLab Workflow for VS Code
GitLab Runner 15.1
View shared runner usage per project in a group
FIPS-enabled Red Hat UBI Dependency Scanning image
Static Analysis analyzer updates
Create annotated Tags with the GraphQL Release API
Deploy keys by user API
Agent server for Kubernetes enabled by default in the Helm chart
More kubectl calls for the agent CI/CD workflow
Geo improves observability with links to replication views
Geo supports OCI container images
Omnibus improvements
Improved SAML Group Link robustness on GitLab.com
Prevent users from using known insecure public keys
Block Git access protocols at group level
Rendered images in Python notebook MRs
Retry a downstream pipeline from the pipeline graph
View your runners’ upgrade status
Optionally ignore scanning NPM development dependencies
Allow CI_JOB_TOKEN authentication for Release Links API
Create annotated tags with the Releases API
Force stop an environment option
GitLab agent for Kubernetes supports proxied connections
Container Scanning analyzer updates
Geo proxying support for site-specific URLs
Native Geo support for Object Storage replication is Generally Available
Bug fixes
