Ask HN: Can GitLab CI support complete infrastructure automation?

3 points·user101010101··4 comments

Not just building things when there are commits but running backups, enabling ChatOps, etc. Is it currently up to the task? Or is Jenkins more flexible/capable in that regard?

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I've found it to work very well. I particularly like how flexible it is and how well it is integrated. You can do some chatops, it even comes with a (not quite feature complete) slack clone (Mattermost), if you like. And, if it doesn't work, GitLab supports interfacing with Jenkins CI (but I don't think you will need to).

They also release updates and improvements at an incredible pace, so next month it will be even better.

Note, I am not affiliated with GitLab in any way, I just use it and love it.

As far as I know integration with Jenkins is only provided as part of the Enterprise version. Please correct me if I'm wrong though.

Hi @justsorneguy, Mattermost team here. Thanks for the mention! What can we add to Mattermost to improve?

I'm curious what you'd expect CI to do regarding running backups. Starting in 9.1, you can run CI pipelines on a schedule, so you could have nightly backups triggered by a CI job, but I would think there are better ways to handle that.

Now if you're following infrastructure-as-code, and your backup and other configurations are saved in version control, then of course GitLab supports that, but that's not explicitly GitLab CI.

GitLab CI does support deployment histories, easy rollback, etc.

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