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GitLab for DevOps teams

Assembly Line

Article from ADMIN 53/2019

By Peter Förger

We show you how one company uses GitLab CI as a platform for continuous integration and deployment processes.

Change sometimes progresses rapidly: Just a year ago, Jenkins was the undisputed continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) king of the hill for the teams at DB Systel GmbH, Germany. Now, some groups are using GitLab CI with growing enthusiasm.

In this article, I highlight why this change is taking place. The best practices described here result from daily work as a network of DevOps experts who support the transformation of groups that are looking to work as DevOps teams in the future or are already doing so. I describe the processes we use that you can also apply to your setup.

CI/CD and SCM

With every new release, an impressive number of new features are introduced to GitLab [1]. The core team has obviously taken up the cause of mapping the entire software life cycle and, in the process, GitLab has become a versatile tool for DevOps teams. From planning to monitoring, the source code management (SCM) software offers a variety of components, the configuration of which varies depending on the edition.

In this article, I refer to the freely available GitLab Community Edition [2]. I also describe scenarios that are particularly relevant for the DB Systel DevOps teams and that have already been successfully implemented with the help of GitLab (i.e., for CI/CD, security, and compliance).

GitLab CI is a GitLab Community Edition component, and thus open source. In particular, GitLab integration boosts the user experience compared with the use of several standalone applications, thus reducing the amount of training required.

Thanks to GitLab, the DevOps team uses container images for each step in the pipeline, which accelerates delivery times. The use of clearly defined and versioned containers allows for pipelines with largely decoupled steps. Dedicated

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