Dimensional Data

Association Française pour le Nommage Internet en Coopération (Afnic) is a longstanding nonprofit in France that manages .fr domain names. Chosen 20 years ago by the French State to operate the .fr country code top-level domain, Afnic’s motto is “reliability first.” Afnic uses GitLab, The One DevOps Platform, to help sustain that motto through modernization of its software development environment. Afnic’s mission as the French National Top Level Domain Registry is to bring together public authorities, Internet users, and domain name professionals to build a secure and stable Internet, open to innovation and in which the French Internet community plays a leading role. Outages of such a digital service could prevent the provisioning of other services that rely on it and could thus have an impact on key economic and societal activities. Afnic started using GitLab about four years ago to build and secure the brand-new version of its Shared Registry System (SRS). The SRS is a platform that manages the domain names from the subscription of a domain name to the publication in the DNS database and all the updates during its life, including contacts, server names, and DNSSEC keys, according to Richard Coffre, Afnic’s principal product manager. Since the project began, all the technologies have changed. Previously, Afnic’s team was mainly using Java and Perl and now they use Kubernetes, Angular, the latest version of Java, and Docker, among others. Security is paramount, and the team is using private clouds. That means Afnic has its own data centers in France and in colocation facilities all over the world. Modernizing software development with automation and integration Afnic selected GitLab to automate and integrate processes during the deployment process. Previously, the majority of things were done manually and now Afnic’s team wants to follow DevSecOps philosophy and governance. They wanted one DevOps platform with state-of-the-art CI/CD capabilities, the ability to quickly onboard new developers, and features to improve compliance and monitoring functionality. Now, Gitlab is one of the core components of Afnic’s systems. The company’s use of GitLab expanded as they deployed new versions of Java and Docker and other technologies. “We wanted to take a big step to align our technology with the state of the market,” Coffre says, and after surveying the development team, the choice was GitLab. The team is integrating GitLab with Jira, which is providing a lot of value, he adds. Now, in addition to developers, Afnic’s database administrators and network administrators use GitLab. The team is using Docker for images and Ansible. Jira is used for ticketing issues and is linked to GitLab and Confluence as a wiki to create the documentation. What GitLab brings to the table The goal for Afnic is to increase automation and to have everything in the same place and for anyone to be able to get at the proper version anytime. “That’s the strength of GitLab,” Coffre says. “That’s also why we chose it because it’s one of the leaders. Like many modern source code management systems, GitLab allows our developers to concurrently create source code. But it does it easily, giving us the possibility to do it safely, remembering our motto.” Previously Afnic used only open source tools that they had to customize, which Coffre says was not efficient on a daily basis. To manage source code […]

Blonk is an international leader in the field of environmental and sustainability research in the agri-food sector. But as a small business without a QA team or a security team, the challenge was figuring out how to deliver professional software with only a few developers. Blonk used an external company to help set up what Bart Durlinger, product development manager, and software devevloper Pieter van de Vijver envisioned as its platform at the time. “They set up an environment on Amazon, a separate built server, a separate repository, and then some scripts in between to link it all together,” Durlinger recalls. “But when we decided to take more control, that was just too complex. We had too many different parts in many different places. We didn’t have the capacity at the time to really oversee how this should all work together.” That’s when the Blonk team started looking for platforms that offered a more integrated approach, with project management, CI/CD, repository, and version control features all in one place. Mature, with a modern vision of software development Blonk turned to GitLab after finding that the platform “had a lot of the things you need to have a professional delivery pipeline integrated into one solution,” says Durlinger. At the time, the consultancy was using GitHub, which was more expensive, he says. When Blonk started with GitLab, the platform was free, which was a big factor in its selection, van de Vijver says. “But it was also an up-and-coming startup with a vision of that CI/CD integration built into how you envisioned the whole service itself,” he says. “GitHub was more of a repository that might provide you with those things, but it required more manual setup.” Blonk liked that GitLab was a mature and stable solution “but still new enough to have a vision of how software is approached nowadays with easy setup and an integrated pipeline by default, and useful branching strategies by which you could support a multi-level, multi-stage deployment process easily,” Van de Vijver says. At the time Van de Vijver was the only one at Blonk with a background as a software developer, and another bonus was his familiarity with all the tools in GitLab. “By using GitLab, we could hit the ground running, and keep the scale small. You don’t have to worry about all kinds of CI/CD operations and integrations and the configuration of that but use it just out of the box,” he says. How Blonk is utilizing GitLab today Currently, Blonk has 38 GitLab premium licenses, about half of which are used by software developers. The rest are used by data scientists, consultants, project managers, and others, so there are different ways the platform is utilized within the company; that also means there are different levels of software literacy but that hasn’t been an issue. The software development team has been onboarding very junior developers over the past couple of months, and “never have I had questions of how to do stuff in GitLab, because the platform is very intuitive,” Durlinger says. The software development team has been integrated further into the core business, which also fits nicely with GitLab’s services, including the milestones Blonk uses as well as its repositories and project management strategies. “Also data scientists and methodology developers are now […]