• There are many tools we can use for Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery such as Jenkins, Github Actions, Gitlab CI/CD, Travis CI, CircleCI, … etc.
• Here, we show the concepts using Gitlab CI / CD

GitLab CI/CD

• Top competitors that you might have used: Jenkins, Azure Pipelines, AWS Codepipelines, TC, etc
• GitLab platform is a DevOps platform (one stop shop for all of your devOps needs)
  • This means managing, plan, create, verify, package, secure, release, configure, monitor and protect on this platform!
• CI/CD pipeline is a core part of the DevOps process

What is CI/CD?

• Continuous Integration & Continuous delivery / deployment

  • This means that automatically execute the pipeline (that you’ve configured) to release new changes to the end user

  • When you merge code to the git repo, it triggers the pipeline to do the rest

    

Benefits of GitLab

• Seamless integration into code repo
• No need to setup CI/CD yourself
• Pipeline configuration as part of your app code
• Self hosted or SaaS (managed)
• Compared to Jenkins: Only CI/CD tool, self hosting is the only option.. etc

GitLab Architecture

• GitLab Server / Instance which hosts your app code and pipeline configuration and excecutes the pipeline → Manages the pipeline execution

• Gitlab Runners → Connected to that server / instance, we have multiple GitLab runners which are separate machines which are actually the ones executing your pipeline

• GitLab.com is a managed GitLab instance that offers multiple managed runners (maintained by GitLab) offered to all users which you can use

  

• For your corporation, you can self-manage the runners or setup your own GitLab Instance