GitLab Inc. today rolled out a new release of its widely used code hosting platform that makes one of the software’s most important capabilities available to customers of top rival GitHub Inc.

Companies that store their software projects on GitHub now have the ability to use GitLab for their CI/CD workflows. CI/CD refers to a set of development practices that organizations employ to quickly turn raw code into a finished application or update.

The CI in CI/CD stands for continuous integration, the approach of syncing a change to a project’s main branch, one of the last stops for new code before it’s released to users, immediately after submission. Quality assurance is performed with automated tests that make sure there are no bugs to worry about. This removes the delays often experienced by teams that rely on more traditional methods.

CD refers to continuous delivery and it applies the same concept to the process of turning code into a piece of working software. The acronym also covers continuous deployment, an approach wherein the entire release cycle is carried out automatically. 

By enabling software teams that use GitHub to handle the process with its platform, GitLab should make development operations considerably smoother for enterprises. In large organizations, different divisions often use different tools for their projects. Having a unified CI/CD tool that works across both GitLab and GitHub code repositories can take some of the complexity out of the equation.

The feature should also contribute to the startup’s growth efforts. If a company that keeps its code on GitHub starts using GitLab to manage software rollouts, it may be more inclined to switch further down the line. That’s the same reason why GitLab provides a similar integration with another competing code hosting platform, Atlassian Corp. Plc’s BitBucket Cloud.

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