This document discusses continuous integration (CI) pipelines in GitLab, including standard GitLab CI and Auto DevOps. Standard GitLab CI requires configuring pipelines, jobs, clusters, and environments manually, while Auto DevOps automatically generates CI/CD pipelines based on a project's code and requires minimal configuration. Auto DevOps provides features like automatic building, testing, code quality checks, security testing, and deployment. It utilizes Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, and GitLab runners to containerize applications and deploy them. The document demonstrates how to enable and configure Auto DevOps on GitLab, including setting up a Kubernetes cluster to deploy apps to production and staging environments.

1. Default GitLab CI Pipeline
Bhanuka Mahanama
CS 795
Fall 2020

2. Outline
● Introduction to CI
● GitLab CI
○ Standard GitLab CI
○ Auto DevOps
● Auto DevOps overview
○ Features
○ Stages
● Configuring Auto DevOps
● Showcase App

3. Continuous Integration
For every change pushed
to the repository,
application is built,
tested, and deployed for
review automatically and
continuously.

4. Standard GitLab CI
● Configure everything from scratch
○ Define
■ Pipelines
■ Stages
■ Jobs
○ Setup
■ Clusters
■ Environments
■ Policies
● Define scripts to run
● Many configurations to set up

5. GitLab Auto DevOps
● Autodiscover from source code
● Jobs based on content
○ Language
○ Frameworks
● Automatically create job structures for
○ Build
○ Test
○ Deploy
● Jobs assigned to stages
● Only selection is Pipeline Strategy
○ Select from common strategies
● Minimal configurations

6. Enabling Auto DevOps
● Self-managed instances
○ Enabled by default
● GitLab.com
○ Settings -> CI/CD
○ Enable
● Delete “.gitlab-ci.yml”

7. Features
● Auto Build
● Auto Test
● Auto Code Quality
● Auto Static Application Security
Testing
● Auto Secret Detection
● Auto Dependency Scanning*
● Auto License Compliance*
● Auto Container Scanning*
● Auto Review Apps
● Auto Dynamic Application Security
Testing*
● Auto Deploy
● Auto Browser Performance Testing*
● Auto Monitoring
● Auto Code Intelligence
*Only Available on Paid GitLab Plans

8. Internals of Auto DevOps
● Docker
○ Containerization
● Kubernetes
○ Container orchestration
○ Deployment and management of containers
● Helm
○ Creating build of kubernetes applications
● Gitlab Runner
○ Executing CI Jobs
● Prometheus
○ Systems monitoring and alerting

9. Auto DevOps: Features

10. Auto Builds
● Builds a Docker image
● Dockerfile in repository
○ Expose application to
5000
● Language specific files
○ Heroku Buildpacks
detects the language
○ Python ->
requirements.txt
○ Ruby -> Gemfile

11. Auto Test
● Detects language and framework
● Runs appropriate tests
● Uses
○ Herokuish
○ Heroku buildpacks
● Some automatically detected
languages
○ Ruby
○ Nodejs
○ Python
○ Java
● Tests included in application

12. Auto Review Apps
● Temporary application
developments for branches
● Review app for each branch
○ <branch-name>.example.com
● Deleted when branch deleted
● Requires Kubernetes cluster
○ No cluster -> no review apps

13. Auto Deploy
● Deploy master branch to production,
and staging in Kubernetes
○ Staging:
<project-name>-staging.example.com
○ Production:
<project-name>-production.example.com
● Allows
○ Automatic production deployment
○ Manual production deployment
○ Rollout production deployment
● Deployment strategy options

14. Configuring Auto DevOps

15. Configuring Auto DevOps: Kubernetes
● Configure Kubernetes Cluster
○ Get the best of Auto DevOps
○ GCP or AWS
○ GCP offers $300 credit
● Configure through GitLab

16. GitLab Managed Kubernetes
● GitLab-managed cluster
○ Allow GitLab for
namespacing

17. Ingress and Prometheus
● Operations -> Kubernetes
● Install Ingress
○ Load balancing
○ Name based virtual hosting
● Install Prometheus
○ Monitoring and altering

18. Enable Auto DevOps
● Settings -> CI/CD
● Enable Auto DevOps
● Select strategy

19. Check CI Pipeline

20. Showcase App
● Branching
○ Review Apps
○ Merging
● Master branch
○ Staging
○ Rollout Deployment
■ Pods in Nodes
● Rollback Deployments
● Cluster monitoring

21. Summary
● GitLab CI
○ CI Pipeline from scratch
○ Configurations to manage
● Auto DevOps
○ Pre-built pipelines
○ Automated language, framework detection
○ Minimal configurations
● GitLab Docs
○ Auto DevOps: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/topics/autodevops/
○ Standard CI: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/
● Hands-on
○ Auto DevOps:
○ Standard CI: https://git-community.cs.odu.edu/bhanuka/gitlab-ci-flask-app.git