Throughout this chapter, we will use popular open source tools to build a full CI/CD pipeline consisting of gating mechanisms, automated deployment, and also showing the concepts of infrastructure automation.
The first such tool is GitLab. You may have heard about it as a Git hosting solution, but in reality, it's much more than that. GitLab comes in several distributions, namely, the following:
- An open source solution that you can host on your own premises
- Self-hosted paid versions that offer additional features over the open source community edition
- And finally, a Software-as-as-Service (SaaS) managed offer hosted under https://gitlab.com
For the requirements of this book, each of the distributions has all the necessary features. We will, therefore, focus on the SaaS version, as this requires the least amount of preparation.
Although https://gitlab.com is mainly targeted at open source projects, you can also create private projects and repositories...