CI/CD & DevOps Automation (GitLab)

Learn what CI/CD means: how continuous integration, delivery and deployment differ, why teams need automation and what a modern pipeline looks like.

Create your first GitLab CI/CD pipeline: write a minimal three-stage .gitlab-ci.yml, understand GitLab Runners, trigger a pipeline and read the job output.

See how a GitLab pipeline is built: how pipelines, stages and jobs relate, what runners do, how needs breaks stage lockstep and where artifacts fit.

Define GitLab CI stages and jobs: the stages keyword and ordering, job scripts, core job keywords, rules and only/except conditions, and parallel jobs.

Use GitLab CI artifacts to pass files between jobs and keep build output: set paths and expire_in, download from the UI, and compare dependencies with needs.

Speed up GitLab CI with caching: define cache paths and keys, use cache policies, see how cache differs from artifacts and cache node_modules and pip.

Use GitLab CI/CD variables safely: predefined and custom variables, masked and protected values, group-level and scoped variables, and precedence rules.

Learn what a GitLab Runner is and how it runs jobs: shared versus specific runners, executors, installing and registering on Ubuntu, and a Docker executor.

Control exactly when GitLab CI jobs run with rules:if, rules:changes and rules:exists, plus workflow rules, merge request pipelines and manual jobs.

Track deployments with GitLab CI environments: the environment keyword, static versus dynamic environments, review apps, protected environments and approvals.

Build and push Docker images in GitLab CI: compare Docker-in-Docker with Kaniko, authenticate to the Container Registry, pick tags and follow a full example.

Run tests in GitLab CI: collect JUnit reports, view results in merge requests, extract coverage with a regex, run in parallel and follow a Jest pipeline.

Add security scanning to GitLab CI: SAST, DAST, secret detection, dependency and container scanning, and DevSecOps habits for secure pipelines.

Deploy to AWS from GitLab CI using OIDC instead of static keys, then ship to S3 and EC2, push images to ECR, update ECS services and automate Terraform runs.

Trigger downstream pipelines in GitLab with the trigger keyword: pass variables, choose strategy depend or mirror, build child pipelines and use include.

Speed up GitLab CI pipelines with better caching, DAG execution using needs, reusable include templates, YAML anchors, rules and protected deployments.