Book Image

Mastering GitLab 12

By : Joost Evertse
Book Image

Mastering GitLab 12

By: Joost Evertse

Overview of this book

GitLab is an open source repository management and version control toolkit with functions for enterprises and personal software projects. It offers configurability options, extensions, and APIs that make it an ideal tool for enterprises to manage the software development life cycle. This book begins by explaining GitLab options and the components of the GitLab architecture. You will learn how to install and set up GitLab on-premises and in the cloud, along with understanding how to migrate code bases from different systems, such as GitHub, Concurrent Versions System, Team Foundation Version Control, and Subversion. Later chapters will help you implement DevOps culture by introducing the workflow management tools in GitLab and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD). In addition to this, the book will guide you through installing GitLab on a range of cloud platforms, monitoring with Prometheus, and deploying an environment with GitLab. You'll also focus on the GitLab CI component to assist you with creating development pipelines and jobs, along with helping you set up GitLab runners for your own project. Finally, you will be able to choose a high availability setup that fits your needs and helps you monitor and act on results obtained after testing. By the end of this book, you will have gained the expertise you need to use GitLab features effectively, and be able to integrate all phases in the development process.
Table of Contents (30 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Install and Set Up GitLab On-Premises or in the Cloud
6
Section 2: Migrating Data from Different Locations
11
Section 3: Implement the GitLab DevOps Workflow
17
Section 4: Utilize GitLab CI and CI Runners
23
Section 5: Scale the Server Infrastructure (High Availability Setup)

Autoscaling GitLab CI Runners

In the previous chapter, we were able to scale GitLab Runners using the Kubernetes executor. Depending on your requirements of how many jobs should be able to run concurrently, the number of available Runners in a Kubernetes cluster can go up or down. Having a big number of runners available can be very costly. Even if they were to be turned off, they would still cost money. It's much better to have them created on demand and destroyed when they are no longer needed.

There is another GitLab Runner executor that can behave in this elastic way and dynamically add or remove Runner instances, and this is known as the Docker Machine executor. We will show you what this looks like from an architectural point of view, explain some of its settings, and provide you with some examples of running the Docker Machine executor with the VirtualBox driver and...