Google and GitLab announced GitLab integration with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), which aims to make it easier to use GitLab with GKE without lock-in.
Google and GitLab announced GitLab integration with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), which aims to make it easier to use GitLab with GKE without lock-in.
Google Kubernetes Engine integration means you can connect a Kubernetes cluster hosted on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to a GitLab project to run continuous integration jobs and to set up a continuous deployment pipeline. According to GitLab’s CEO Sid Sijbrandij, the GKE integration allows developers to set up and configure managed deployment environment on GCP without requiring them to understand all the details of how Kubernetes manages their clusters.
To enable the full GitLab-GKE integration in your project, a number of requirements must be met, such as enabling Google authentication from within GitLab, setting up a Google billing account, having Master permissions, and enabling both the Cloud Billing and the Resource Manager APIs. If all those conditions are satisfied, you can create a new Kubernetes cluster from GitLab UI by providing a number of configuration settings such as a cluster name, a GCP project ID, the zone under which to deploy the clsuter, the number of nodes composing it, the machine type, and the associated environment.
Once the Kubernetes deployment environment is set up and configured, developers can use GitLab’s Auto DevOps feature to create a complete workflow from build to deploy and monitoring based on a number of templates which greatly reduce the required configuration steps. Additionally, using GitLab’s Review Apps feature, you can preview your changes live before deploying them to Kubernetes. Other GitLab features that can be used with GKE are Deploy Boards, and Canary Deployments. As mentioned, since the integration between GitLab and GKE relies on the standard upstream Kubernetes source, developers can easily port their applications to a different Kubernetes platform.
GitLab integration with GKE is available in GitLab 10.6 and can be tried for free for 30 days.
