GitLab CE 2024: A Year in a Nutshell
As the year draws to a close, it’s again the time to reflect and celebrate the milestones achieved. But before diving into our GitLab recap, we have some exciting news to share. By contributing on behalf of Siemens, B310 has claimed the top spot on the GitLab Leaderboard for contributions over the past year, an incredible achievement that fills us with pride.
Additionally, Gerardo has been recognized as one of the most active contributors on GitLab, highlighting his consistent dedication and impact:
But enough of patting ourselves on the back, lets dive in the annual GitLab recap.
2024 Recap
The year 2024 brought many new GitLab releases, starting with version 16.8 on January 18th and culminating in version 17.7 on December 19th. Below, we highlight some of the standout features—particularly from the Community Edition (CE) of GitLab. Here is our take on the most memorable new features of 2024:
- Let’s start with a feature tailored to roles that have become indispensable in modern companies: data scientists and data engineers. These professionals play a critical role in making sense of the vast amounts of collected internal data. To support their workflows, GitLab introduced the ‘Model Registry’ in beta, a powerful new feature that streamlines the management of machine learning models and their associated metadata. This enhancement enables teams to effectively use GitLab as a robust model registry backend, boosting efficiency and collaboration in data science projects. More: GitLab Release Notes 17.1.
- Are you using GitLab to connect, deploy and update a Kubernetes cluster? Then log streaming for Kubernetes pods and containers could make the difference this year for you. GitLab Release Notes 17.2.
- Sharing pipeline code snippets and toolings with the community was already common, but lacked simplicity and a central hub. Not anymore: Meet the CI/CD catalogue: A magic toolbox for all kinds of community created components to support pipelines and automation tasks. See GitLab Release Notes 17.0.
- Annoyed clicking this merge-button again and again while all the checks already passed and the MR could have been already merged? “Auto Merge” to the rescue, see GitLab Release Notes 17.4.
- Merge request feedback is a central part of living in our continous integration world. Giving and including feedback sometimes takes way more time then just writing the code. But so far it was up to the author of the merge request to decide if the feedback was a comment, a request for change or merely a small note. Meet the new feature “Request changes on merge requests”: Authors of MR reviews can now make a selection between “comment”, “approve” and “request changes” to make it easier for the asignee to know what to do! See GitLab Release Notes 16.9.
- Ever tried setting up GitLab on a device with limited input possibilities? GitLab in 2024 got you covered! With “OAuth device authorization grant support” it is possible, to complete the OAuth authentication process, for instance, on headless servers. See Gitlab Release Notes 17.2.
- If you are using GitLab as a registry for your own npm packages, chances are you wanted to give fine grained access to certain roles or accounts to avoid accidental changes. For instance, only accounts with the role “Owner” should be allowed to update a certain package. This feature is called “Protected Packages” and was introduced in GitLab 17.5 by Gerardo! See GitLab Release Notes 17.5.
- When a job in a pipeline fails, often all other jobs are being canceled. To get more fine grain control for that behaviour, the feature “Options for auto canceling pipelines” was introduced to give more control. See GitLab Release Notes 16.9.
- Creating API tokens is simple, but over time, it can become challenging to track their purpose and usage. To address this, Nicholas introduced a new Token API, providing a clear and efficient way to manage and organize tokens, see GitLab Release Notes 17.6.
- Rotating tokens was already possible via API, but now its possible to achieve the same using the UI for personal, project and group access tokens, see GitLab Release Notes 17.7
- Got lost in the CI/CD variable interface? Many improvements were made, see GitLab Release Notes 16.9.
- And finally: A new planner role to give dedicated permissions to agile planning tools like epics, roadmaps and kanban boards, see GitLab Release Notes 17.7
Enterprise
One big feature set that is not included in the community edition but the internal GitLab-Team was focused on, is the introduction of GitLab Duo Enterprise and Duo-Chat. These are GitLab’s own AI-Coding assistence services. For instance, one interesting feature for Duo-Chat is the option to summarize merge request code changes, issue discussions or ask questions about a particular merge request. Since version 17.6., its even possible to define your own hosted large language model (LLM). However, paid licenses are required. See also GitLab Release Notes 17.6 as well as GitLab Release Notes 17.5.
2025 Outlook
What a year! The next year will with no doubt include more updates on GitLab Duo and Chat. But what about the community features? Some spoilers from our perspective:
- Protected Packages: Support for pypi and more package formats, see GitLab Issue and GitLab Epic.
- Protected containers: Rollout & Release on gitlab.com, see GitLab Issue and delete protection, see GitLab Issue.
- Step-up authentication for admin mode and groups to increase the security of GitLab, see GitLab Issue.
- … and more!
Questions? Feel free to contact us!
Happy new year in advance and happy coding!
