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 ...

In a blue-green deployment strategy, there are always two instances of your application running in production. A reverse proxy is used to direct traffic to either the green or the blue version. You then deploy changes to your application by first updating the inactive version and then changing the load balancer config to redirect traffic to the updated instance. In this video, I will show you how to set up a very simple version of such a blue-green deployment using ...

Imagine you work on an application on a development server for several months until it is time to deploy it to a production system for the first time. Chances are, there are several necessary configuration tasks just waiting to be forgotten: firewall permissions, specific software libraries, file permissions and so on. Ansible offers a reproducible and automatable way to take care of these configurational changes for you – and the beauty is: it does not depend on a specific Linux ...

Bernhard Knasmüller on Software Development