Troubleshooting and the Road Ahead with GitLab

By now, we have covered the end-to-end use of GitLab CI/CD for planning, building, testing, and shipping software. You should hopefully be familiar with the vocabulary of GitLab CI/CD pipelines and Runner infrastructure, and you should also have the confidence to develop and deploy basic applications with GitLab.

CI/CD occupies a constantly shifting space in the software industry. The best practices and tools of the trade today may very well be obsolete five years from now, if not earlier. We have made a conscious effort in this book to maintain a balanced focus between concepts and tooling. The goal is to preserve relevance by emphasizing CI/CD and DevOps fundamentals, while still offering you a chance to practice and follow along, even if the syntax and some of the tools change over the next several years.

The purpose of this final chapter is to synthesize what we’ve learned and guide you toward the next steps in your DevOps...