Book Image

Automating DevOps with GitLab CI/CD Pipelines

By : Christopher Cowell, Nicholas Lotz, Chris Timberlake
Book Image

Automating DevOps with GitLab CI/CD Pipelines

By: Christopher Cowell, Nicholas Lotz, Chris Timberlake

Overview of this book

Developers and release engineers understand the high stakes involved in building, packaging, and deploying code correctly. Ensuring that your code is functionally correct, fast, and secure is a time-consuming and complex task. Code implementation, development, and deployment can be conducted efficiently using GitLab CI/CD pipelines. Automating DevOps with GitLab CI/CD Pipelines begins with the basics of Git and GitLab, showing how to commit and review code. You’ll learn to set up GitLab Runners for executing and autoscaling CI/CD pipelines and creating and configuring pipelines for many software development lifecycle steps. You'll also discover where to find pipeline results in GitLab, and how to interpret those results. Through the course of the book, you’ll become well-equipped with deploying code to different environments, advancing CI/CD pipeline features such as connecting GitLab to a Kubernetes cluster and using GitLab with Terraform, triggering pipelines and improving pipeline performance and using best practices and troubleshooting tips for uncooperative pipelines. In-text examples, use cases, and self-assessments will reinforce the important CI/CD, GitLab, and Git concepts, and help you prepare for interviews and certification exams related to GitLab. By the end of this book, you'll be able to use GitLab to build CI/CD pipelines that automate all the DevOps steps needed to build and deploy high-quality, secure code.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Part 1 Getting Started with DevOps, Git, and GitLab
6
Part 2 Automating DevOps Stages with GitLab CI/CD Pipelines
11
Part 3 Next Steps for Improving Your Applications with GitLab

Technical requirements

Like the previous chapters, you’ll get the most out of this chapter if you have an account on a GitLab instance (SaaS or self-managed). Moreover, the topics and examples in this chapter will increasingly focus on deploying to environments that live outside GitLab. The infrastructure tools that are referenced include the following:

  • A server hosting GitLab (or GitLab.com)
  • Self-hosted runners (or SaaS runners hosted on GitLab.com)
  • Docker (also available on SaaS runners hosted on Gitlab.com)
  • Kubernetes
  • Cloud platform services (such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, or Heroku)

If you wish to minimize the amount of tooling you need to install and maintain yourself, we recommend using GitLab.com with SaaS runners. We also recommend creating an account on a cloud service platform if you wish to practice deploying to live or complex infrastructure. Just be aware of the potential charges when using these services.

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