Introducing GitLab Serverless

Introduction

GitLab, partnering with the multi-Cloud serverless management platform provider TriggerMesh, has released GitLab Serverless capabilities to its existing DevOps solution. Serverless uses Google’s Knative, the Kubernetes-based platform to build, deploy, and manage modern workloads. Users now can install Knative on Kubernetes clusters via GitLab and then deploy their serverless functions. GitLab Serverless is available with GitLab 11.6 from December 22nd and the “Serverless” tab is available for users as an alpha offering.

What Is Serverless?

Serverless is an industry standard term used to refer to software architecture that allows developer to deploy small, discrete blocks of code (often a single function) that execute on an event. Amazon Lambda, GitLab Serverless, and Google Cloud Functions are popular examples of serverless technology. Serverless computing provides an easy way to build highly scalable applications and services, thus eliminating the pains of provisioning and maintaining.

Serverless architecture has given the potential and, with the rise of microservices, it’s fully possible to build complex, complete applications on nothing but serverless functions and connected services. With the Serverless feature, developers can deploy code without needing to worry about the infrastructure that their code will run on. Computing power will dynamically have spun up to run a function when it’s called and then goes away when there is no more load. This feature has benefits in both cost, since a server doesn’t need to be running if no one is using the service, and scale.

Advantages

By using GitLab Serverless, developers can orchestrate an entire “GitOps”-style lifecycle. Serverless service is built on TriggerMesh’s serverless management platform. This platform offers orchestration capabilities. Once a developer commits code, it can be pushed into production automatically, or be automatically moved on to a set of tests, or for further approval. The serverless services gives developers fine-grained control over permissions, and runtime schedules.

GitLab Serverless provides flexibility to developers for deployment of serverless functions and apps to any Cloud or infrastructure directly from the GitLab UI. Serverless services are built by using the open-source project for building, deploying, and managing serverless workloads with Knative.

Features

  • GitLab Serverless functions-as-a-service (FaaS) capabilities allows developers to write small, discrete units of code with event-based execution. Developers now can deploy code without worrying about the infrastructure it will run on. Code could be executing when it’s needed, so developers don’t use computing resources when the app is idle.
  • It’s a single-application DevOps experience. The Serverless platform allows enterprises to plan, build, and manage serverless workloads with the rest of their code from the same GitLab UI.
  • Developers can gain flexibility and portability by running serverless workloads on the Kubernetes platform. Knative enables autoscaling down to zero. Leveraging Knative to serve your Kubernetes cluster automatically scales pods up and down based on load. The Scale to zero feature stops consuming resources when there are no requests. You now can choose the computing model that best meets the need instead of being locked into a specific provider to run their functions.
  • Running serverless workloads on Kubernetes allows businesses to strategize a multi-Cloud environment and leverage the value of serverless without being locked into a specific Cloud provider. GitLab Serverless uses Knative to create a seamless experience for the entire DevOps lifecycle.
  • You can go with a multi-Cloud architecture and deploy to any Cloud or on-premises infrastructure. GitLab Serverless connects to any Kubernetes cluster so that a developer can choose to run serverless workloads anywhere Kubernetes runs.

The Serverless home screen
Figure 1: The Serverless home screen

How to Activate GitLab Serverless

GitLab Serverless is providing a free 30 days trial.

Conclusion

For more details, check out the official Web site of GitLab Serverless.

That’s all for today, happy reading!

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