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

Troubleshooting and the Road Ahead with GitLab

By now, we have covered the end-to-end use of GitLab CI/CD for planning, building, testing, and shipping software. You should hopefully be familiar with the vocabulary of GitLab CI/CD pipelines and Runner infrastructure, and you should also have the confidence to develop and deploy basic applications with GitLab.

CI/CD occupies a constantly shifting space in the software industry. The best practices and tools of the trade today may very well be obsolete five years from now, if not earlier. We have made a conscious effort in this book to maintain a balanced focus between concepts and tooling. The goal is to preserve relevance by emphasizing CI/CD and DevOps fundamentals, while still offering you a chance to practice and follow along, even if the syntax and some of the tools change over the next several years.

The purpose of this final chapter is to synthesize what we’ve learned and guide you toward the next steps in your DevOps...