I'm curious about the difference. Jenkins, ok. Sure. But in what way are Travis/CircleCI/Semaphore vastly different from Gitlab CI/CD? honest question.
Right on. GitLab has everything right there for me from SCM, to it's own Docker container registry, to static site hosting capabilities (think generated documentation), issues management, etc etc. I've tested the setup of many of them and GitLab was the quickest/easiest/most configurable.
What GitLab gets right is having TONS of enterprise-quality solutions available to you in _one place_... for 100% free as their community offering is AMAZING. That's insanely valuable to me as a startup engineer who doesn't have the time to run 4-5 disparate solutions that are difficult to integrate in a secure/simple way.
Having one solution for the above list has been a "game changer" to me because I've got one monolith piece of software to keep updated/manage vs. stringing a whole bunch of solutions together - and I say "monolith" in a 100% positive context =)
Then there's just the speed issue... I did DevOps at a huge mega-corp not long ago and the expectation of "major things to get done" was 3-4 things a week. Now that I'm doing my own startup my expectation on my self is 3-4 major things _in a day_. GitLab is the only tooling that I can imagine keeping up with me with near-zero BS, and because of that I'm a _huge_ brand advocate for them! (Not directly affiliated, just a passionate user!)
All-in-all I understand people have different tools and that's totally cool, but I did a lot to test out different CI/CD tooling and GitLab was amazingly simple, secure, and quick to setup.
