GitLab on Thursday announced it's making its continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) tools available to businesses and open source users on GitHub, a competing code repository.
The integration allows GitLab users to create a CI/CD project in GitLab connected to a GitHub code repository. Whenever code is pushed to GitHub, GitLab CI/CD will automatically run and post results back to GitHub.
GitHub has more than 27 million users, and without its own CI tools, it offers several third-party integrations to services like Travis CI and CircleCI. However, this is the first time GitLab has let users run CI/CD on a different source code management platform.
GitLab is trying to reach more developers this way because it believes CI/CD is "a core component of making your DevOps transformation," Mark Pundsack, head of product at GitLab, told ZDNet.
GitLab has expanded its platform in recent years with more DevOps-focused tools and now counts several major enterprises as customers, including Ticketmaster, Alibaba, Sony, and Intel.
Many large enterprise customers are standardizing on GitLab CI, Pundsack said, but still use GitHub for some source code management. This new integration should help those customers, he said. GitLab also recently acquired Gemnasium, a security testing firm that has several customers using GitHub. Those customers can now use GitLab CI/CD for their security needs without have to migrate their code.