Published on December 18, 2023 at 9:37
Welcome to “To the Point” series, a curated collection of concise articles crafted for seasoned data professionals who seek to quickly review core concepts and sharpen their skills. Whether you’re preparing for an interview, refreshing your knowledge, or just staying sharp in a fast-evolving field, this series delivers essential insights with precision and clarity. Each article goes straight to the heart of the topic, distilling complex ideas into manageable bites that are easy to digest and apply. This isn’t a beginner’s guide — it’s a focused resource for those who already know the landscape but seek to refresh it. GitLab CI’s free tier provides 400 minutes per month with 5 GB of storage.
One approach to centralizing the CI/CD configuration is to use GitHub Actions with GitLab CI YAML files. GitHub Actions uses a different YAML syntax than GitLab CI/CD, and it may not support all of the features provided by GitLab CI/CD. Additionally, using GitHub Actions with https://traderoom.info/gitlab-ci-vs-github-actions/ GitLab CI YAML files may require additional configuration and maintenance.
You can leverage its vast ecosystem of prebuilt actions (reusable code snippets) to automate most DevOps tasks. Want to automatically send notifications to your team on deployment success? GitHub Actions is a built-in automation engine that lets you define custom workflows for your development process in GitHub.
Cloud-hosted applications are applications that were originally built for on-premises and later migrated to the cloud. Adopting cloud-native development has significant advantages for both businesses and development teams. It depends on the complexity of your project, infrastructure preferences, and the expertise of your team.
GitLab CI/CD also provides features such as container scanning, code quality analysis, and version control. GitHub Actions and GitLab CI/CD are both popular tools used for Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) in software development. Both GitLab CI/CD and GitHub Actions offer powerful features for automating the software development lifecycle. Your choice will depend on your specific needs, existing workflows, and the tools your team is currently using. GitHub Actions shines with its tight integration into the GitHub ecosystem, making it an attractive choice for teams already invested in GitHub as their primary code repository. Its extensive marketplace of pre-built actions and excellent community support make it a compelling option for teams looking for a vast library of integrations.
Storing sensitive information in variables shouldonly be done in the project, group, or instance settings. When a new pipeline starts, GitLab checks the pipeline configuration to determinewhich jobs should run in that pipeline. You can use the rules keywordto configure jobs to run depending on conditions like the status of variables, or the pipeline type.
Masked variables are hidden in job logs, while protected variablescan only be accessed in pipelines for protected branches or tags. Jobs are a set of commands that run in a set sequence to achieve a particular result,for example building a container or deploying to production. If you’re migrating from GitHub Actions to GitLab CI/CD, you are able to create CI/CDpipelines that replicate and enhance your GitHub Action workflows. Choosing between GitLab CI and GitHub Actions depends on several factors, including your project’s complexity, your team’s familiarity with the tools, and your budget. Both tools allow you to schedule workflows to run at specific intervals.
You can use the ‘extends’ keyword to reuse configuration sections of those hidden jobs. If you are familiar with anchors, you can use those natively as well with your GitLab pipelines. Reference’ custom YAML tag to make a selection of keyword-based configuration and reuse it throughout our pipelines.
Another essential component is the .gitlab-ci.yml file, where the pipeline configuration is defined, specifying the stages, jobs, and their respective scripts. GitLab Runners, which are used to execute jobs, can be customised and distributed, offering flexibility in resource management. These components work together to provide a robust and efficient framework for continuous integration and delivery. When it comes to workflow flexibility, both GitHub Actions and GitLab CI/CD offer unique strengths. GitHub Actions stands out with its event-driven model, allowing workflows to trigger on a wide variety of events beyond just code commits, such as pull request comments or issue updates.
This will be a non-starter for almost everyone and they invariably find themselves making tweaks to their workflow YAML files and see what breaks. We can choose the tag or branch name of the pipeline version we want to use. Below, you can see I want to use the konfig-dataflow template from the main branch. While I was building out this template, I was able to switch to a @feature-branch to test and validate my changes. This alone has saved me hours of time and removed the potential for breaking downstream customers. You can pass in variables as inputs to your pipeline here, which is another powerful tool we leverage for our products.
Unlike traditional software, applications built using this method are highly modular, scalable, and easy to update. This empowers organizations to quickly respond to changing customer demands. While it’s possible to use GitHub Actions with GitLab CI YAML files, this approach has limitations and may require additional configuration and maintenance. When working with multiple repositories, it can be useful to centralize the CI/CD configuration in a single location. However, GitHub Actions and GitLab CI/CD use different YAML syntax and have different features, making it challenging to centralize the configuration for both tools in a single repository.
As a result, it’s probably the most widely used Git repository within corporate data centers, even though the CI/CD integration is not included in the open core. Choosing a solution to create or improve your CI/CD pipeline may seem like a daunting task. Read on to learn more about the benefits and limitations of choosing CircleCI, Github Actions, and GitLab.
In GitHub an Action is a set of complex tasks that need to be frequently repeated and is savedto enable reuse without redefining a CI/CD pipeline. In GitLab the equivalent to an action wouldbe a the include keyword, which allows you to add CI/CD pipelines from other files,including template files built into GitLab. Today we will look into the development process and compare the three most popular continuous integration, testing, and rolling out your code. The article will help you determine if you need to make a choice or if you have already mastered one and want to learn more about the others. It allows you to automate workflows directly from your GitHub repository.
Having a test environment where the only difference was adding the Buildkite agent was a trivial addition. Drone is out, GitHub actions are being considered along with Circle CI and GitLab CI. Both GitLab CI/CD and GitHub Actions offer free tiers, with GitLab limiting minutes and GitHub limiting storage. Paid plans in GitLab provide unlimited minutes for a fixed cost per user, while GitHub Actions charges per minute used.