Their CI system runs actual workloads as well. To be honest I don't understand why they prioritized this but it seems to me like Gitlab has a path to becoming

Their CI system runs actual workloads as well. To be honest I don't understand why they prioritized this but it seems to me like Gitlab has a path to becoming a lot more than what Atlassian is right now; by owning not just the devops but also the cloud itself. It sort of makes sense if that's something they aim for, but it'd be an uphill battle and to be honest I don't see it ever working out. But there's huge rewards there if it does work out. It's kind of the reverse of Amazon tried to do (AWS is trying to compete with Github etc by having their own code hosting and code deploy services, which doesn't ever lead anywhere except for die-hard AWS fans). I'm giving Gitlab the benefit of the doubt on this for one simple reason: I was very doubtful of their current strategy of building in a monsterhouse of features to their product. Then I actually used it and was impressed with how smooth and useful it all is. It also took me actually using it to understand what exactly they were doing. Most people are confused about Gitlab today because they compare it to Github, but Github really only does code hosting and barely even touches development lifecycle; whereas Gitlab is more like Atlassian (and goes beyond that, even). It owns code hosting, product management, development, and deployment. So the "natural next step" in that direction is devops, which they have already been playing with.