Summary
People who don’t work for software companies might not realize there’s more to writing software than just... writing software. After it’s checked in, a long and complicated series of steps must be followed to build, verify, secure, package, and deploy code before users can get their hands on it. All these steps can be done manually, or some of them – under certain conditions – can be automated. But both manual and automated approaches to preparing software pose problems.
DevOps is a relatively new approach to accomplishing these steps. It combines automation, collaboration, fast feedback, and iterative improvement in a way that lets teams make software better, faster, and more cheaply.
GitLab is a DevOps tool that collects all these tasks under one umbrella, allowing a software development team to accomplish everything with a single tool, using a single GUI, with all the test results and deployment status displayed in a single place. Its focus on automation addresses the problems raised by manual processes. Its single-tool model addresses the problems raised by automated processes. GitLab puts all the DevOps principles into practice through the use of CI/CD pipelines, which will be the main focus of the rest of this book.
But before we deal with CI/CD pipelines, we need to take a quick, one-chapter detour into Git, the tool around which GitLab is built. Without a solid grounding in the basics of Git, you’ll likely find many of GitLab’s concepts and terminology confusing. So, batten down the hatches, grab a big mug of your favorite caffeinated beverage, and let’s jump into Git.
