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

Building code for multiple architectures

GitLab CI enables you to build artifacts for multiple architectures at once. This can easily speed up software builds by two or three times since, with multiple architectures, you typically have to build the software multiple times for each architecture. Here, we’re going to use CI jobs and pipelines to execute a software build for multiple architectures at the same time.

When building software for multiple architectures, there are some special requirements. The first requirement is that you must have GitLab Runners installed and configured on a machine running each architecture. For this section, we’re going to use three platforms as an example: x86_64, arch64, and powerpc. In this case, the expectation would be that you have a machine for each of the three architectures, with a GitLab Runner installed on it. That GitLab Runner also needs to have a tag assigned to it for which architecture it is running on.

The second requirement...