Get started managing your infrastructure

With the rise of DevOps and SRE approaches, infrastructure management has become codified and automatable. You can now employ software development best practices in your infrastructure management.

The daily tasks of a classical operations team have changed and are more similar to traditional software development. At the same time, software engineers are more likely to control their whole DevOps lifecycle, including deployments and delivery.

GitLab offers various features to speed up and simplify your infrastructure management practices.

Infrastructure management is part of a larger workflow:

Workflow

Step 1: Use code to manage your infrastructure

GitLab has deep integrations with Terraform to run Infrastructure as Code pipelines and support various processes. Terraform is considered the standard in cloud infrastructure provisioning. The various GitLab integrations help you:

  • Get started quickly without any setup.
  • Collaborate around infrastructure changes in merge requests the same as you might with code changes.
  • Scale using a module registry.

For more information, see:

Step 2: Interact with Kubernetes clusters

The GitLab integration with Kubernetes helps you to install, configure, manage, deploy, and troubleshoot cluster applications. With the GitLab agent, you can connect clusters behind a firewall, have real-time access to API endpoints, perform pull-based or push-based deployments for production and non-production environments, and much more.

For more information, see:

Step 3: Document procedures with runbooks

Runbooks are a collection of documented procedures that explain how to carry out a task, like starting, stopping, debugging, or troubleshooting a system. In GitLab, runbooks are created in Markdown. They can include a variety of elements, including text, code snippets, images, and links.

Runbook in GitLab integrate with other GitLab features, like CI/CD pipelines and issues. You can trigger runbooks automatically based on specific events or conditions, like when a pipeline is successful or an issue is created. In addition, users can link runbooks to issues, merge requests, and other GitLab objects.

For more information, see: