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

Preface

Organizations in recent years have recognized the benefits of more collaborative and iterative approaches to software development. The traditional model, where development and operations teams worked in silos, made it difficult for companies to quickly and reliably deliver new features. The adoption of DevOps has addressed these challenges by promoting integration and communication between development and operations. The additional proliferation of tooling and automated workflows have helped improve software quality and stability.

A key element of DevOps is continuous integration and continuous delivery (or deployment) (CI/CD). CI/CD is the practice of regularly integrating developer contributions into a shared repository, and then automatically building, testing, and releasing the application. The goal is to minimize the cycle time required to deploy software updates, as well as reduce human error during the process.

This book presents and teaches GitLab as a unified DevOps platform for managing the stages of the software development life cycle. The content will focus primarily on concepts and examples, without locking you into feature capabilities and UI workflows that will likely change over time. After completing this book, you will be equipped to use GitLab to manage almost any software project, while also learning about the best practices that can be applied across other DevOps workflows and CI/CD tools.