Faster Pipelines, Smarter Agents, And Bigger Wins In This September Monday Merge!
We’re rolling into September with a fresh release, a game-changing white paper, and a customer spotlight that shows what DevSecOps at scale really looks like. Let’s get into it 👇
GitLab 18.3 is here with Duo Agents in your IDE, Embedded Views, and more
This release brings improvements across every layer of the platform, from tighter security and compliance controls to deeper AI assistance inside your dev tools.
Here’s what’s new:
- Duo Agent Platform in Visual Studio (Beta): For the first time, developers can access GitLab Duo Agent Chat and Agent Flows directly within Visual Studio. That means you can ask for help, automate tasks, plan architecture, and generate code—all without leaving your IDE.
- Embedded Views (GA): Turn static epics, wikis, and issues into dynamic, queryable dashboards powered by GLQL. Keep your team aligned with real-time data wherever work is happening.
- Fine-grained permissions for CI/CD job tokens: Apply the principle of least privilege and control exactly what each job token can access.
- Migration by direct transfer (GA): Move projects between GitLab instances with less friction and more reliability.
- Duo Self-Hosted updates: Support for hybrid model selection, bring-your-own-model flexibility, and Code Review custom instructions.
Plus dozens more enhancements to the Web IDE, compliance controls, admin roles, and CI/CD integrations with AWS Secrets Manager.
💜 Big shoutout to the community for 314 contributions to this release. Everyone truly can contribute.
Agentic CI Modernization: Smarter pipelines. Faster payback.
Enterprises want to modernize their CI/CD pipelines. But the reality? It’s often slow, expensive, and too complex to scale.
GitLab’s new white paper introduces a breakthrough: Agentic CI Modernization, powered by the GitLab Duo Agent Platform. This isn’t just theory, the lab testing shows:
⏱️ 81% faster pipeline translation (from 240 mins to 45 mins)
💸 83% lower consulting costs
📉 CI/CD modernization timelines cut from 2.5 years to 9 months
Why does this matter? Because traditional modernization often stalls under the weight of tool sprawl, context switching, and consultant-heavy delivery models. Agentic AI changes that.
GitLab Duo Agents analyze legacy pipelines, understand architecture and dependencies, and generate GitLab CI configurations. This helps reduce errors by up to 70% and accelerates time to value.
TThis white paper isn’t just about saving time; it’s about unlocking platform engineering at scale, enabling developers to consume shared CI/CD components as a service and focus on building value.
Customer Spotlight: Deutsche Telekom
From 18-month release cycles to just 3 months. From siloed tools to over 13,000 users on a unified GitLab platform. From manual security checks to fully integrated scanning with GitLab Ultimate.
Deutsche Telekom is the telco giant serving over 240 million mobile customers. More than just a network provider, it’s now a DevSecOps powerhouse!
By centralizing on GitLab, Deutsche Telekom IT scaled CI/CD adoption across the company and fostered a new “inner source” culture. Today, 75% of the company’s Agile programs rely on GitLab.
“If you have [security] integrated in one application, you can immediately jump to the right place and fix the problem... This is increasing the efficiency of handling security findings.” — Thorsten Bastian, Business Owner IT, CI/CD Hub, Telekom IT
Our docs just got a glow-up
Say hello to the new docs.gitlab.com – rebuilt from the ground up for clarity, speed, and ease of use.
What’s new:
- A modern interface that works beautifully across devices
- Smarter search to help you find exactly what you need
- Cleaner navigation and improved accessibility
Catch us at these upcoming events
From São Paulo to Singapore, we’re taking GitLab on the road this month. Come say hi, grab some swag, and talk all things DevSecOps!
🇧🇷 Google Cloud Summit Brazil. 👉 Register here
🇸🇬 EPIC Conference Singapore. 👉 Register here
🇨🇭 Google Cloud Summit Switzerland. 👉 Register here
Get hands-on with GitLab Duo and walk away with new ideas, fresh insights, and maybe even your next big deployment win.
What we’re reading
From agentic AI breakthroughs to securing software at scale, here are a couple of reads we can’t stop thinking about this month:
A little inspiration
Modernizing pipelines, consolidating tools, and embracing agentic AI can feel daunting—but big changes always start small. That’s why this month’s quote hits home:
“It always seems impossible until it’s done.” — Nelson Mandela
And remember, if you’re staring down a tricky pipeline, just think that impossible just means 'not yet.'
Until next time
Thanks for hanging with us. Want to share your thoughts? Tag us or drop a comment on LinkedIn—we love hearing from you.
And, as always, Happy merging!
Fatima Sarah Khalid | Developer Advocate, GitLab
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🚀 Founder & CEO at Collaboration Empire | Entertainment Management & Production | AI & Web3 Innovator | Digital Legacy Architect | Social Media Marketing
3wFaster Pipelines · Smarter Agents · Bigger Wins Currently on the table: • $750 B+ in potential global value from AI-driven software innovation. • 95% of FinServ execs say software innovation is now a core business priority. • 93% report measurable business growth this past year tied to AI investments. • 93% expect agentic-AI (autonomous software development) to be the industry standard within 3 years. That’s not a future forecast — it’s an urgent call. If you’re still treating software like a cost center, you’re already behind. You need to treat it as your growth engine. 💡 Build the pipeline. Empower the agents. Dominate the value. #AI #SoftwareInnovation #FinTech #AgenticAI #DigitalTransformation #CollaborationEmpire #BusinessGrowth Read more →
Senior DevOps Engineer | Jenkins, GitLab CI, TeamCity | Ansible, Puppet, Terraform | AWS, GCP | Kubernetes and CI/CD Expert
2mocool
DevOps / SRE | AWS • Terraform • Kubernetes | CI/CD, Automation, and Cloud Reliability Engineering
2moCool to see GitLab making waves in the CI space with the Duo Agents. That's pretty impressive to scale from 18 month cycles to 3 months.
Impressive update 🚀 GitLab continues to set the standard for developer productivity. The modernization story (18-month cycles → 3 months) is especially inspiring — a great reminder of how the right tools and architecture can accelerate transformation.