Deploying to real-world production environments

In the examples presented so far, we have shown that environments are simply organizational categories in GitLab with associated names and URLs. In the real world, however, environments represent actual infrastructure, be it your computer’s or someone else’s. That means recognizing the constraints on the available resources and the importance of proper security and access control.

In this day and age, it is increasingly common to use cloud service providers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform for application hosting. These services not only outsource the need for infrastructure management but they also provide programmatic interfaces for managing your environments.

Moreover, suites of developer tools for managing these resources have accompanied the rise of cloud service providers, apart from the cloud vendor-provided tools. Software such as Terraform, Ansible, and Chef is available to declaratively...