🎉 Introducing deployment gating for GitLab in Jira Service Management

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📢 Announcing the release of deployment gating for GitLab for Jira Service Management Premium and Enterprise! With GitLab deployment gating turned on, changes to the environments you choose will be paused until they receive change advisory board approval in Jira Service Management.

More importantly, your developers can focus on shipping value for your customers, while IT can effectively manage potential risks to your environments.

We released deployment tracking for GitLab in August and now, we’re excited to continue expanding our CI/CD tool integrations so developers can push deployments for change control board approval while in GitLab by introducing deployment gating capabilities.

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How it works: the gating and approval process

Let’s say you are looking to commit a change in GitLab as shown below.

For the purposes of this example, we are committing a change to an environment that requires manual approval from the change advisory board and thus has deployment gating on. As you can see, the change is currently paused at the deploy stage and there is a notice that explains the change is awaiting approvals.

Moving to Jira Service Management, you will see that a change request has been created automatically. Instead of moving to deployment, the change is paused for approval. It’ll stay paused until the change is either approved or declined.

When the change is approved, the developer can see in GitLab that they can now begin the deployment by clicking “Run job.” If you go to Operate > Environments, you can also see the change request issue key and link so that you can navigate to Jira Service Management to see who made the approval action. Afterwards, navigate to your pipelines page where as seen in the first row, the “Passed” status and checkmarks for all stages signal successful deployment.

But what if a change is rejected by the approver? In that case, the deployment will fail and the developer would be notified via email and can find the rejection notice inside GitLab.

Whether a change is approved or denied, developers are able to automatically track changes from GitLab in Jira Service Management to leave a clear record of changes without straying from their existing workflow. And on the flip side, IT gets clear visibility into what’s changed, and the ability to maintain oversight to critical systems.

Setting up GitLab deployment gating for your Jira Service Management project

Are you a GitLab user and want to start using deployment gating with Jira Service Management? View our support article for a step-by-step walkthrough.

Note: You’ll need an extra configuration for users to set up the deployment gating feature with GitLab. If you’re already using the Jira for GitLab app but do not wish to use the deployment gating feature, you can use the existing features without any problem as long as extra configurations are not made.

Have more questions? Leave us a comment below so our team can jump in and answer!

Thoughts & feedback

What do you think? We’d appreciate any thoughts you’re willing to share on this new functionality. Feel free to drop any questions or suggestions here, or submit it via our feedback portal.