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GitLab offers Digital Ocean to soak up customers' CI burden

Don't worry, yells CEO, we have a data centre in the EU

GitLab has struck a deal with Digital Ocean to offer autoscaling to ease the build and test bottleneck associated with Continuous Integration.

GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij said the advent of CI has necessitated more and more testing, and provisioning the machines needed for this has become more and more expensive and time-consuming for developers. Unsurprisingly, he continued, “it’s very attractive to farm this out to the cloud.”

So, in GitLab’s case, the preferred cloud is Digital Ocean’s, which markets itself as being able to spin up a new instance in 55 seconds.

At the same time, GitLab has added autoscaling to GitLab Runner, its software for processing builds. The result is that developers can spin up and wind down new instances as needed, on Digital Ocean’s platform.

According to GitLab’s blog, the deal will “provide free Runners to all projects on GitLab.com as well as discount codes for GitLab Community Edition and Enterprise Edition users.”

Asked what exactly the benefit was for both companies of offering customers something for nothing, Sijbrandij said Digital Ocean was keen to target the larger enterprises which GitLab is itself chasing: “They want to get in front of large organisations.” He said the partnership would be reviewed after a year.

Digital Ocean’s operation is currently concentrated in the US, but it has a data centre in Amsterdam, which Sijbrandij reckoned should put to rest any customer concerns over shipping IP out of the EU. ®

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