Dive Brief:

• GitLab is doubling down on two of the hottest cloud markets, Kubernetes and serverless computing, with a renewed spotlight upon it following Microsoft's 2018 GitHub acquisition. 
• Last year, GitLab moved from Azure to Google Cloud Platform, enticed by the Google Kubernetes Engine. The company used its Geo product to run a mirror of its instances in case a failover took place during the migration, in the process successfully fixing 45 bugs that occurred at scale, according to Sid Sijbrandij, co-founder and CEO, in an interview with CIO Dive. 
• In late December, the company rolled out GitLab Serverless, a Kubernetes-based platform for building, deploying and managing serverless workloads across clouds. The solution, built on open source standards, allows customers to get around vendor lock-in, a sore spot for serverless technology. 

Dive Insight:

Kubernetes, a container orchestration system open sourced by Google in 2015, provides a valuable service to GitLab, allowing customers to bring their cluster and attach to to GitLab, which manage deployments and other software needs. 

Container and serverless capabilities help customers add portability to their portfolios, according to Sijbrandij. On the scale of multicloud adoption maturity, most companies are somewhere between "mono-cloud," where different processes are in place for each cloud used, and workflow portability, where teams can move workloads between clouds. 

Application portability is the next level, and serverless computing is crucial in helping teams deploy the same application on different clouds without having to make a lot of changes, he said. 

Google's July launch of Knative, an open source tool to help companies run serverless workloads anywhere, was an important foundation for the Git-repository's serverless offering. 

Many customers still use GitLab to deploy nonserverless applications, such as Ruby on Rails. Knative's release allowed GitLab to support those efforts as well as serverless applications on the same framework, Sijbrandij said.

While these tools help simplify cloud native development, the challenge of extending capabilities to more developers in the enterprise persists. 

Cloud native adoption is still limited to smaller groups of developers at many companies, and automating tasks such as deployment, security checks, monitoring and logging frees up developers to focus on writing code, according to Sijbrandij. Pushing those capabilities to more developers is a focus for the company in the coming year.