https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2022/05/17/arm-open-source-makes-a-seamless-migration-to-gitlab/ [ ] Blog / Devops Platform DevOps user stories customers Arm Open Source makes a seamless migration to GitLab Esther Shein * May 17, 2022 * 5 min read * Leave a comment --------------------------------------------------------------------- [2] When Arm Open Source wanted to take back ownership of several open source projects the company was running on GitHub, the company decided to transfer them onto a new platform and build up from there. Arm selected GitLab as its new platform. Arm builds software that acts as enablement pieces that can be integrated with other software on its architecture. Over 95% of mobile devices have Arm processors and the software powers compute from sensors up to the cloud. On their own, the enablement pieces are "not all that fantastic, but the magic comes when you join them with other bits of software from other communities and other projects," explains Andrew Wafaa, distinguished engineer and senior director of software communities at Arm. The goal is to give software developers the best of the Arm architecture, he adds. The enablement pieces "leverage a lot of the bells and whistles from the Arm architecture and that allows people to take those and integrate them with other stacks." GitLab open source lets Arm use its own tooling Arm was using GitHub for source code hosting. But most of the new core infrastructure that Arm is deploying is on proprietary hardware, and "GitHub is a black box and so we would have to work with them or let them do the work, and it wouldn't necessarily be correct," Wafaa says. "Then we'd have to do reviews. We wouldn't necessarily be able to do the patch reviews because it's all private and proprietary code... that was a big factor for us choosing GitLab." In addition, they had concerns about the code ownership of their OSS projects hosted on GitHub. Therefore an OS solution like GitLab would be the best option to maximize choice, be cost effective, and minimize vendor lock-in. Moving to GitLab self-hosted supported effective collaboration and enabled Arm's software to be hosted on Arm technology. A large bonus for Arm was that GitLab is open source and the company wanted to use its own tools to support its open source ecosystem. "Using an open source product made sense at the end of the day," Wafaa says. Another big factor was that GitLab is an enterprise-grade product that provides very similar workflows to what Arm was using on GitHub. "It's very easy to move from GitHub to GitLab; the terminology is very similar," as well as the look and feel, he says. Further, GitLab is a self-hosted enterprise product, and it was important to Arm to have good customer support in the event that something goes wrong. Of course, cost was also a consideration and that tipped the scales in GitLab's favor as well, Wafaa says. "When we're looking at future growth plans, it certainly equates to reasonable savings." Arm has about 200 external contributors running open source projects, "and GitLab made it appealing cost-wise," Wafaa says. "That was just the icing on the cake." Usually the number of contributors is higher but Arm had to scale it back as it migrated projects to GitLab, he adds. Maintaining control every step along the way Arm is in the process of moving as much of its infrastructure as possible to run on the Arm architecture. Although GitLab didn't initially support Arm, the company "was quite happy to work with us and our engineering teams to ensure that it did support Arm" by creating integrations with its infrastructure, Wafaa says. "The fact that we could have that fine-grained access control was a huge boon to us and being able to replicate it on Amazon's infrastructure globally gave us that full redundancy and disaster recovery requirements to meet our IT's needs," Wafaa says. Because Arm is an IP company, security is paramount. Wafaa says they opted for a gradual migration and then will "slowly add the layers to the onion." "For us to deploy, we have to go through multiple hoops with various security teams internally, and that went fairly smoothly. It just worked," he says. After a "mini deployment," everything is working seamlessly, according to Wafaa. Now, anyone can run GitLab on Arm from an enterprise perspective. Then Wafaa and others held their collective breaths awaiting feedback. "Our most critical engineering team is our kernel team. They are very, very particular," he says. Since the team has been migrated onto GitLab, "they have been full of praise," which "unnerved" Dean Arnold, Arm's DevOps lead for the open source program. "He's not used to getting praise from them," Wafaa says. "It stood up and worked really well for them." Arm has migrated about 90% to GitLab and migration is ongoing. Certain projects are taking longer because they have complex tooling and the integration pieces are still being ironed out, Wafaa says. Solid metrics for Arm With GitLab, Arm has found a number of benefits, including the following: * ease of CI/CD setup and integration * cost savings of between 15% and 20% * time savings of an average two-to-four people a month on admin work * tool simplification * the ability to share and collaborate on pipelines/code * quick setup of new projects and onboarding of teams Previously, there were multiple individual components that would have to be then stitched together, Wafaa says. "GitLab actually offers us more features and more functionality than we're necessarily used to, and that's great." That's especially useful because other contributors want to use pretty much every feature possible for their projects, both for corporate and personal use. For example, one engineer uses GitLab in a personal capacity and wants full CI capabilities. Both Wafaa and Arnold are confident that once the migration is completed, there will be significant time savings and projects will be onboarded quickly. Easy deployment in the cloud On tap now is working through how to share parts of the pipelines so that teams can adopt things quicker, Arnold says. By the time the migration is completed, Arm will have most of what contributors need, he says. Right now, Arm is using EC2 instances in AWS. Looking ahead, Arnold envisions that deployment between cloud providers will become more seamless without having to change underlying code. "Once we've got people fully onto GitLab, then we'll look at how we can expand it and perhaps add in HA via the containerized route. That's an interest, but it's further down the line," he says. Shein is a contributor to GitLab. "Migrating to GitLab helps Arm Open Source achieve up to 20% in cost savings, and to enable software developers to leverage a lot of the bells and whistles of the Arm architecture." - Esther Shein Click to tweet Sign up for GitLab's twice-monthly newsletter Thanks for subscribing! --------------------------------------------------------------------- Tags: DevOps user stories customers More to explore devops platform Biden administration accelerates software supply chain security expectations a year into Executive Order Sandra Gittlen GitLab profile Sandra Gittlen devops platform DevOps in Education 2021 Survey results devops platform GitLab Heroes unmasked: How a difficult start in coding led to being a valued contributor Jamie Rachel GitLab profile Jamie Rachel All Blog Posts Try all GitLab features - free for 30 days GitLab is more than just source code management or CI/CD. It is a full software development lifecycle & DevOps tool in a single application. 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