Deploying to a Kubernetes cluster

We previously discussed the ubiquity of cloud services as alternatives to self-hosted infrastructure. In a similar vein, container orchestration systems such as Kubernetes have become increasingly popular as alternatives to the manual management of bare-metal servers or container hosts.

Deploying to Kubernetes with GitLab CI/CD can be conceptually similar to the workflows we have covered thus far. You can set up a GitLab runner with a Kubernetes executor, which communicates to the clusters using the Kubernetes API. Alternatively, GitLab optionally offers an additional approach called the GitOps workflow, which is not wholly reliant on CI/CD pipelines. We will summarize each of them in turn.

The CI/CD workflow

Using the concepts so far, you can use a normal CI/CD setup to deploy containerized applications to Kubernetes. This requires a runner registered with the Kubernetes executor. During runner registration, information such as cluster host...