The team behind repository management platform GitLab has release version 12.5 of the project, extending its multi-cloud strategy to Amazon’s EKS and offering paying customers a new cross-project environment-based view amongst other things.

Starting with GitLab 12.5, users with an AWS account can choose Elastic Kubernetes Service when setting up a Kubernetes cluster via GitLab’s clusters page and use it to deploy to Amazon’s cloud. Prior to this release, Google’s GKE was the only major Kubernetes cloud offering officially supported by GitLab.

Additional integrations for a variety of providers are supposed to follow, which is meant to help customers following a multi-cloud approach. To facilitate application and resource management in this area, multi-cloud control plane Crossplane is now available as an GitLab Managed App. It can be installed into Kubernetes clusters and used to declaratively provision cloud services. Speaking of containers, the GitLab Container Registry should work more reliably in the new release, thanks to some slight changes the team made to the Docker Registry.

After almost two years of discussions, GitLab has now been fitted with a Sourcegraph integration. Once it has been properly configured and activated via the preferences, it provides code navigation for easier reference finding and similar tasks during the software writing process. Another long requested feature that made it into the current version is a way of showing custom artifacts in the merge request widget.

Apart from that, teams can now link one or more milestones to a release. Issues and merge requests connected to the milestones will automatically appear on the associated release page, giving users a better overview of what has happened since the last version. Once a feature branch has been merged, it is deleted by default in GitLab 12.5, if the option isn’t disabled in the project settings.

Customers who are on premium/silver or ultimate/gold plans can look forward to trying a new Environments Dashboard. The latter can display up to seven projects and three environments (such as staging or production) per project to get more insight into their statuses and find possible system bottlenecks. 

On top of that, GitLab is now able to render Grafana metrics for ultimate/gold users directly in issues, so that they don’t have to post screenshots anymore, and let ultimate users scan containers without web access. A complete list of changes can be found in the projects’changelogs.