The release of GitLab 14.2 brings an exciting new feature to the management of CI/CD pipelines. Stages can now be completely omitted. Instead, the dependencies between pipeline jobs can be specified using the needs keyword. In this article, I will go into these changes and show you an example pipeline definition file making use of stageless pipelines. Traditionally, CI/CD pipelines in GitLab would consist of multiple stages and each stage would contain multiple jobs: The reasoning behind this structure was ...
Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) style dependencies between individual stages in a continuous deployment pipeline allow for a more flexible workflow and better utilize available computational resources. Imagine a simple pipeline consisting of three jobs: A syntax check A code complexity check Running all unit tests You may be tempted to group those in two stages: A) Build (consisting of jobs 1 and 2) and B) Test (consisting of the unit tests): Traditional Sequences In plain old GitLab pipelines, you would ...