GitLab provides small business with a professional, mature DevOps platform
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 […]
