Introduction

Definitions

• CI/CD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment): A DevOps practice that automates building, testing, and deploying code changes, enabling faster and more reliable software releases.
• Pipeline: An automated process that moves code changes through a series of stages, from initial commit to final deployment.

GitLab Architecture

The architecture consists of the GitLab server and Runners that execute the jobs.

graph LR
    Server[GitLab Instance / Server] -- "job-1" --> Runner1[Runner]
    Server -- "job-2" --> Runner2[Runner]
    
    subgraph "Architecture"
    Server
    Runner1
    Runner2
    end

Components

1. GitLab Instance/Server:

• Example: gitlab.com (SaaS maintained by GitLab) or a self-hosted instance.
• Users can connect their own runners or set up their own GitLab instance.

2. GitLab Runners:

• Agents that run CI/CD jobs.
• The GitLab server assigns pipeline jobs to available runners.
  • Tags: The tags field can be used to run a job on a specific GitLab runner (e.g., tags: - runner-tag).
  • Containers: GitLab’s managed runners use Docker containers.