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Comment by sureshn | Hacker News Reader

I see an opportunity for a continuous delivery platform , if you notice on stackshare people use Jira(trello) , github , gitter(slack) and travis/jenkins for their work , so much of context switching happens navigating(working) the tools. The idea here is to build one platform which will have all of this in Tabs and available to the teams in a hosted manner. So when one delivers code , the next tab he should be able to see a CI build kicked off and the following tab a docker container which is ready to host the built new code commit for QA.

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Perhaps instead of reinventing each tool that already does well in its own space, one could build a platform that allows users to link all these tools (if API is available) and customize with their own workflow and dashboard. I wonder if there's anything similar already existing yet? I feel in some big corps they may have developed their own proprietary homegrown tools for these.

I totally see the value in this, but the tools that do each individual component are very sophisticated. Either you rebuild all that functionality, or you strip them down, or you just have them work together. We are all in the third phase because the needs around each tool are so complex that people need the complicated software in each piece and they want to mix and match.

GitLab is doing this. They currently have:

- Issue tracking (jira)

- Issue kanban (trello)

- Git repository

- Chat, via bundled Mattermost (gitter/slack)

- CI (jenkins)

- Docker registry

Plus, they're planning on adding even more features. We have a self-hosted instance at work and I use it for pretty much everything other than email and actually writing code.

Thanks, this is exactly what we're doing. The complete scope is detailed on https://about.gitlab.com/direction/#scope

By the way, we see Mattermost as an alternative for Slack but not for Gitter. One is team chat and the other is 'project' chat with different requirements.

This is excellent to hear all this awesome work being done by gitLab. I was even more impressed by them recently when they admitted the production data loss and restore (such humility is rare these days). one wonders why they shouldn't rebrand and give a more apt name, at the outset you wont know they offer so much

The name doesn't help with that but I think renaming it would be a huge time sink for our customers, users, and ourselves.

Mattermost is the one thing listed above that I don't use. What do you see as the differences between team and project chat? I've always seen Gitter as chat with one room per repo; on the other hand, I've also never had a team chat.

Project chat is easier to enter. Anyone can join.

We see Gitter as more of a place than a product. It's a community (single network) where anyone can participate in just about anything. It's about connecting developers around the world to one another through the medium of chat.

Sure it can do similar things to Slack/MatterMost, but that's not the intention of what we're trying to do with it.

Does that really add that much more value over and above essentially the same setup except the tabs are implemented by your browser on different web pages?

It does , because this is one platform with fully inter operable work item, build number, change set id , deployment server integration readily available , if you notice the individual tools, they come from different org's and have different way of working , except that they have a rest API exposed for you to integrate any other tool in a limited way. Its like when a developer makes one line of code change , he or she can use this platform to shepherd the change into production in a fully automated manner and take responsibility for the same.

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