Developers like to create new software, but until we deliver the software to production, it creates no value. Traditionally, we tend to set up cumbersome CI/CD pipelines using numerous tools; we follow complex processes like GitFlow; our QA people still test everything in a staging environment.

Containers promised us a whole new world, where we can have predictable environments and can compose tools in sets, create new environments fast and easy. To make it work, orchestrators appeared and finally, we found ourselves in a world of even more complexity around tools, configuration file, and operational concerns. Some have dropped the idea of using containers in production entirely, some struggle building an effective delivery pipeline.

We need to have seamless experience and tooling that allows us to go from the idea to code, from code to container images, from images to deployment. We need a proper feedback cycle with pull requests, code reviews, and testing for each feature in isolation. Several tools might help us to achieve this goal, and the one that got closest to the promised land is GitLab.

During this talk, we will create a .NET application with WebAPI and set up the delivery pipeline with GitLab and Kubernetes. We will be able to deploy our app to staging and production environment and even have separate “review” environments for each merge request, where testers can go and test the application for each separate change.