GitLab has pushed out the enigmatically named v11.11 of its eponymous DevOps platform this week, and chose to flag up new features with a particular focus on Containers and Windows.

The latest version adds a Windows Container Executor for GitLab Runners, which it said “will enable the use of Docker containers on Windows, allowing for more advanced pipeline orchestration and management.”

This means users can use Docker containers directly on Windows, instead of using the shell executor to orchestrate Docker Commands. The company said this will allow, “More advanced kinds of pipeline orchestration and management for our users of Microsoft platforms.

The update also has “improved” PowerShell support across GitLab, “as well as new helper images for various versions of Windows containers.”

Sticking with containers, v11.11 introduces a caching dependency proxy for Container Registry, although this will just be for self-managed instances initially. GitLab said that “keeping a copy of needed layers locally using the new caching proxy, you can improve execution performance for commonly used images in your environment.”

Version 11.11 also delivers a beta of instance level Kubernetes clusters, which GitLab said will “allow you to connect a Kubernetes cluster to the GitLab instance, which enables you to use the same cluster across multiple projects.”

Other key features, from GitLab’s point of view, include the addition of the ability to assign multiple assignees to a merge request.

Further additions are, amongst other things, deployment notifications for Slack and Mattermost, so that events can be automatically shared via both platforms, and Guest Access to releases – but not to source code or repo info – via the Releases page.

A stack of other features and changes includes adding the option to buy further CI runner minutes to GitLab’s free plans, and the ability to sign in to GitLab using Salesforce credentials.

If it feels like this is a particularly significant release, that could be that you’re peculiarly attuned to the spiritual realm, with New Age types thinking the sequence is particularly significant. Or it could simply be that the next scheduled release will be 12.0, details of which you can peruse here.