Conclusion and next steps

This book has guided you through using GitLab as a platform to manage your software development life cycle. After discussing the state of the industry before DevOps emerged as a culture and methodology, you were then guided through the basics of Git version control and GitLab’s project management components. Then, GitLab CI/CD pipelines were introduced as the central feature for organizing, designing, and automating your development workflow.

You learned that GitLab CI/CD comprises three components: the text-based pipeline configuration file, the runners that execute pipeline tasks, and the main GitLab application that coordinates between the configuration and the runner agents. We then walked through how to leverage pipelines to verify, secure, package, and deploy your code. You learned that you can use GitLab CI/CD as a unified tool to perform these often-disparate steps in the software life cycle.

After covering the supported CI/CD features...