The launch of Cloud Seed by GitLab Inc., provider of the One DevOps Platform for software innovation, in collaboration with Google Cloud, announced it now streamlines migration to the cloud within a single platform. The solution seeks to relieve developers and DevOps teams of cloud consumption pain points—without sacrificing efficiency or simplicity, according to the vendor.
“Our 2022 DevSecOps Survey found that DevOps and cloud adoption are two key priorities within the industry—and through our work with hyperscalers, like Google Cloud, we’ve noticed that the organizations we onboard to GitLab’s single platform also tend to shift to the cloud in tandem,” said Ashley Kramer, acting CTO at GitLab. “This capability will enable organizations to accelerate their cloud adoption while still ensuring they can work within the One DevOps Platform. We’re thrilled that this launch aligns with the priorities of the market and allows our customers to innovate in exciting ways.”
Built directly into the GitLab web UI, Cloud Seed employs CI/CD pipeline functions to allow seamless consumption of Google Cloud services. Cloud Seed enables developers, amid the developing or refactoring process for existing applications, to attach native Google Cloud services directly from the GitLab UI. Automated cloud resource provisioning, as well as deployment and configuration automation, position Cloud Seed as an easy to use, accessible, organic cloud adoption tool.
Cloud Seed comes at the heels of GitLab’s 2022 DevSecOps survey, a direct response to the findings that revealed a need for simplistic cloud transformations that scaled at the speed of market changes. According to the report which surveyed more than 5,000 software professionals, 69% of respondents desired consolidated toolchains to ease the complications of context switching between tools. Forty percent of developers spend roughly one-fourth to one-half of their time maintaining or integrating complex toolchains, which is a quantity that has more than doubled from last year alone. The implications are clear; without streamlined tools for DevOps, overall productivity plummets, and will continue to do so as more and more tools become available, according to the vendor.
“Cloud Seed focuses entirely on improving the developer experience,” said Nima Badiey, VP of alliances at GitLab Inc. “The open source nature of the offering allows for extensibility and community driven roadmaps. By integrating Google Cloud services directly into GitLab, organizations will be able to accelerate cloud adoption and application modernization without piecing together multiple applications and tools—for a much simpler, more streamlined process.”
GitLab’s survey also pointed to a need for security within cloud migration services and tools. Due to deployment demands and speed-to-market constraints, security methodologies and solutions struggle to remain consistently productive in an ever-mutable landscape. With 60% of developers surveyed releasing code at accelerated rates than previously, and 70% of developer teams release code continuously, security risk is in constant surge. The expanding requirements aimed at code developers entirely explains why security professionals attribute 75% of vulnerabilities to them; heterogeneous tools strewn about the DevOps workflow directly compounds with the quantity and rate of code demands, leaving security inadequately equipped to safeguard against risk. Cloud Seed provides the solution for the aforementioned security challenge, according to the company.
“A developer who needs a PostgreSQL database may download/use an unknown version from an untrusted source, potentially exposing their company and customers to a security vulnerability,” explained Badiey. “With Cloud Seed, developers eliminate security concerns by using native data, storage, and app services from Google Cloud through the GitLab UI; cloud services provided and managed by Google are more secure and more reliable than unreliable, disjointed, open tools.”
To learn more about Cloud Seed, please visit https://gitlab.com/.