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.