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DevOps GitLab Hackathon

It is easier than ever to get started in DevOps. There are many opinions on the definition and implementation of DevOps but for this series of articles, we will focus on automation and technical best practices from a green field perspective.

I am technology agnostic and have used many similar technologies like CruiseControl.net, Hudson, Jenkins, Azure DevOps, GitHub, GitLab, CircleCI, and even built some in-house CI automation using bash and java. As many won’t have direct access to commercial enterprise tooling, we will be looking to set up what we need with open-source and or free saas services. The platform we will be using is GitLab, this has a great SaaS offering as well as the ability to install on-prem if needed. I personally lean to SaaS services as I don’t want to maintain the infrastructure, upgrades, backup strategy, security patching, etc for the platform and just expect that part to work. I have a few projects on Azure DevOps that were created over a decade ago and still work today and have had to do reality nothing to maintain them. It is understandable for some organizations to want to have more control or have some regulatory requirements which in our examples can be brought down and easily used with GitLab.

The first two pillars of any DevOps implementation is good source control and automating everything…. yes everything.

As we explore and as technology and services are ever-changing the intent is not to have screenshots of everything and will rely on the existing documentation of these services. Feel free to go beyond the examples. If there are areas that end up being unclear, please contact me, and will provide updates in the next releases.

  1. Getting started!
  2. Adding Secret Scanning
  3. Creating a change
  4. Using Visual Studio Code and GitLab
  5. Connecting to Code Quality
  6. Create Unit Test
  7. Run Code Coverage
  8. Dependency Scanning
  9. SAST Scanning
    … lots more to come

This is a work in progress, if you are interested in helping create content, please contact me.