speed up gitlab ci feature

Speed up GitLab CI – the 5 best tips for fast pipelines

Starting from an overview of frequent causes for slow pipelines, I derive 5 tips to speed up GitLab CI pipelines. These include choosing the appropriate runner infrastructure, choosing the right caching approach (Docker vs. GitLab), DAG pipelines, mixing GitLab’s caches and artifacts, and optimizing individual jobs (e.g. via parallelization). Introduction As I already explained in … Read more

gitlab vs docker caching

GitLab CI/CD: GitLab vs. Docker caching – how to get insanely fast CI/CD pipelines

Using a Node.js example project I demonstrate how Docker-based caching can speed up your GitLab CI/CD pipelines even more than GitLab’s built-in caching mechanism. I explain how each approach works, and what the technical prerequisites are. I also list tools that support you with setting up a Docker-based CI pipeline. Introduction Caching of files between … Read more

self-hosted gitlab runner

Operating a self-hosted GitLab runner with Docker

In this article I explain how (and why) you install and use a Linux-based self-hosted GitLab CI/CD runner that executes jobs of your GitLab pipelines. I go into a few caveats and how you can reduce maintenance efforts for the runner to a minimum. Introduction GitLab CI/CD has a distributed architecture that consists of a … Read more

GitOps with GitLab ArgoCD and Renovate Bot

GitOps for managing cluster software using GitLab, ArgoCD and Renovate Bot

This article demonstrates how to use the ArgoCD GitOps controller to deploy applications to a Kubernetes cluster. The definitions/manifests of these applications, such as an Ingress controller, monitoring stack, etc., are stored in GitLab. They are automatically updated by Renovate Bot, which regularly scans your GitLab project for outdated dependencies. A demo project illustrates how … Read more

gitlab ci/cd introduction

Introduction to GitLab CI/CD pipelines: a complete guide to get you started

This article provides a detailed introduction to the general concepts of GitLab CI/CD pipelines. It discusses the anatomy of the pipeline definition file, how GitLab distributes and runs jobs on runners, and what good practices you can follow. I also explain how the containerization of CI jobs affects their ability to build Docker/OCI images. Introduction … Read more