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Workflows are defined in YAML files located in the .github/workflows directory of the repository. When working at an enterprise level, with many development teams across many business units, configuring and organizing your CI/CD toolkit is what can make or break your project deadlines. An important aspect of this organization is how your project structure is handled. At first glance, GitLab and GitHub seem very similar in how they structure project hierarchies.

1. GitHub Actions is GitHub’s CI/CD solution designed to automate workflows directly within the GitHub ecosystem.
2. Cloud native is an approach to designing and building applications for dynamic cloud environments.
3. We at Real Kinetic are not sponsored by GitLab nor do we get paid by them.
4. More importantly, code reuse allows us to enforce standardization around these types of tasks.
5. Each platform has its unique strengths and caters to specific developer preferences and organizational requirements.
6. GitLab CI/CD and GitHub Actions are two popular tools used to automate code integration, testing, and deployment in software development workflows.

GitHub Actions and GitLab CI/CD are both robust CI/CD platforms that provide essential automation capabilities to streamline software development workflows. Each platform has its unique strengths and caters to specific developer preferences and organizational requirements. GitLab CI/CD handles complex pipelines through the .gitlab-ci.yml configuration file, allowing developers to define multi-stage workflows and job dependencies. The CI/CD options from GitLab, in my opinion, do not seem to have the same level of support in the ecosystem for prebuilt items to help with continuous testing. Again, as with the other CI tools, a single command is run in the workflow with some parameters included in a configuration file (primarily the location of the application to test).

These systems, GitLab CI/CD and GitHub Actions, have been gaining a lot of adoption in enterprise software. I am going to break down how these systems work, which one we think is the better solution, and why we have built our own product around it. Cloud-native tools are designed to optimize the development, deployment, and management of applications in cloud environments. Cloud native is an approach to designing and building applications for dynamic cloud environments. By prioritizing rapid development and frequent updates, organizations are able to innovate faster and reduce operational complexity. Both tools are powerful and can handle complex CI/CD workflows, but the choice between them often comes down to the platform your repository is hosted on and the specific features you need.

Released in 2019, it has gained popularity pretty fast because of its ease of use and seamless integration with GitHub repositories. GitLab provides every project a container registryfor hosting container images. Container images can be built and stored directly fromGitLab CI/CD pipelines. In this case, no extra configuration is needed to make the jobs run in parallel.Jobs run in parallel by default, each on a different runner assuming there are enough runnersfor all the jobs.

This eliminates conflicts caused by differing development environments and keeps your workflows clean and reliable. This is a one-stop shop for linting, validating, viewing your workflow YAML, and even selecting which version of a templated pipeline to use. Having come from GitHub Actions, after seeing this suite of tools, I wondered why something like this has not been implemented by GitHub. It really is a game-changer and saves tons of trial-and-error commits while building and debugging pipelines. One can argue that with thoughtful design and strong ownership, code reusability is essentially solved in both systems.

1. Actions looks like GitLab CI/CD but there are some differences between them.
2. By understanding the unique strengths and use cases of GitLab CI/CD and GitHub Actions, you can make a more informed decision that aligns with your development strategy.
3. However, it requires a more structured setup using the .gitlab-ci.yml file.
4. Consider the complexity of your workflows—are simple, event-driven automations sufficient, or do you need multi-stage pipelines with conditional logic?
5. GitLab CI/CD allows you to define and run CI/CD pipelines using .gitlab-ci.yml files in the repository.
6. DEV Community — A constructive and inclusive social network for software developers.

How to run parallel tests on Github Actions and Gitlab CI to execute 1-hour test suite in 2 minutes?

Developers often build cloud-native applications using serverless, which is a service for building and running applications without managing servers. But serverless services aren’t the only tool in cloud-native development. Others include microservices, containerization, continuous integration, and continuous delivery. Choosing between GitLab CI/CD and GitHub Actions ultimately depends on your organization’s needs, existing infrastructure, and preferred workflows.

GitHub Actions is generally more affordable, especially for smaller projects. This workflow triggers on push events and runs a job on an ubuntu-latest environment, executing an echo command. BitBucket is popular among many large organizations because of its user interface and integration. GitHub copied a lot of Gitlab`s features, including CI (similar configuration and price). Actions looks like GitLab CI/CD but there are some differences between them. While both platforms have impressive features, they also have notable limitations.

When it comes to pipeline debugging, GitLab hands down has the better toolset. I would suggest comparing the two; however, most of the features we are going to look at are non-existent in GitHub Actions. What is great about GitLab’s ‘include’ feature is that it works across repositories.

For projects with specific needs—like certain hardware requirements—GitHub offers self-hosted runners, giving developers control over the performance and configuration of their workflows. However, setting up advanced deployment strategies, like canary or blue-green deployments, often requires a bit of manual tweaking and expertise. GitLab CI/CD is an integral part of GitLab, a complete DevOps platform that offers source code management, project management, and CI/CD functionalities in a single application.

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CI/CD tools automate the process of code integration, testing, and deployment, ensuring frequent and reliable delivery of updates to cloud-native applications. Platforms like GitHub integrate with a variety of CI/CD tools to make it easier for teams to build, test, and deploy applications. Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) play a pivotal role in modern software development, automating testing and deployment processes. Two of the most popular platforms for CI/CD are GitLab CI/CD and GitHub Actions.

github actions vs gitlab runners

Each job executes a specific task or group of related tasks and moves on to the next task until the pipeline completes or fails. Typically, they are Linux VMs or containers configured to execute the pipeline tasks. Both GitLab and GitHub have adopted this approach, and even the terms used to describe the CI/CD pipeline are mostly the same between these systems.

Many GitHub features and https://traderoom.info/gitlab-ci-vs-github-actions/ concepts have equivalents in GitLab that offer the samefunctionality. This configuration triggers the workflow on push events to the main branch. In this article I will try to focus on the functionality and features of a certain platform.

This approach allows developers to define a base configuration that can be customized for each repository. Another approach is to use a configuration management tool, such as Ansible or Terraform, to manage the CI/CD configuration for multiple repositories. GitLab CI/CD extends the GitLab platform to allow developers to run continuous integration and delivery pipelines against their code repositories. Much like GitHub, GitLab offers a full suite of functionality that developers can leverage throughout their development cycles.

When a successful validation completes, you get a readout of the code your jobs will run. If you have any failures such as syntax errors or dependency logic, it will give you a stack trace and tell you where the issue lies. You can also directly use GitHub actions as steps, but we find the native GitLab capabilities superior if you’re not migrating existing large, complex pipelines. Monitoring tools track the performance and health of cloud-native applications, while observability tools provide deeper insights into the behavior of applications, focusing on metrics, logs, and traces. Although similar in name, cloud-native applications aren’t the same as cloud-hosted applications.