GitLab CI/CD Consulting

Problems we solve

• Monolithic .gitlab-ci.yml files duplicated across every repository
• GitLab Runner on a single VM, no redundancy, scales poorly, breaks on large builds
• No CI/CD component library, each team reinvents the same deploy job
• Shared variables and credentials not scoped to environments, dev pipelines can deploy to prod
• Long pipeline times because jobs run sequentially when they could run in parallel stages

Our approach

1. 01

   Pipeline review

   We audit your existing .gitlab-ci.yml files across repositories, identify duplication, long job chains, and credential scope issues.

2. 02

   Component library design

   We extract common jobs into a CI/CD component library hosted in a dedicated GitLab project. Teams include components by version reference, enabling centralised updates.

3. 03

   Runner infrastructure

   We deploy GitLab Runner on Kubernetes using the gitlab-runner Helm chart with the Kubernetes executor. The Kubernetes executor creates a job pod on demand for each job.

4. 04

   Security and environment gates

   Protected environments with required approval rules for production. Variables scoped to environment tiers. Container images scanned with Trivy before deployment.

5. 05

   Optimisation

   DAG needs keywords eliminate artificial stage barriers. Cache configuration for npm/pip/Maven. Merge request pipelines cancel superseded runs. Build times often improve, depending on the pipeline.

Results