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

Understanding GitLab’s security scanning strategy

There are a few fundamental principles underlying GitLab’s security scanners that will be useful for you to know before you learn about what each scanner does. Let’s look at those now.

GitLab uses open-source scanners

It might surprise you to learn that all the security scanners discussed in this chapter are third-party, open-source tools; none of them are developed in-house by GitLab. For example, IaC scanning is performed by the open-source tool Keeping Infrastructure as Code Secure (KICS), and Dependency Scanning is handled by the open-source tool Gemnasium.

That doesn’t mean that these third-party scanners are inferior to GitLab-developed software in any way. They are all rigorously researched and vetted by GitLab before they are adopted as official GitLab scanners. Furthermore, GitLab frequently reviews new open-source security scanners to see whether they should replace or supplement any of...