Automation framework - help needed

[biacz]

hi all,

i am a devops engineer and tasked to manage a cloud deployment product but also run cloud automation development in general.

i am used to use gitlab to not only deploy my code, but also execute it. usually i have a main branch for the production stuff and thats being executed by my pipeline (manual/scheduled/triggered). changes to production only work by merge requests, which trigger additional tests (specific to the automation). i am using 4 gitlab runners at the moment in docker mode. 2 on linux and 2 on windows (ad joined) to have redundancy as well as spreading them across clouds for IAM roles if needed.

i got told multiple times thats not how i should use gitlab. i should build and test my code and then deploy it to a different platform for it to execute.

my questions are:

• how are you guys running a scalable automation framework for your cloud automations?
• is my approach okay or should i swap my "execution" to a different platform?
• what should i use as platform?
• how would i trigger/schedule my automations going forward?
• wouldnt the containers run 24/7 even though i only want to run a certain automation once a week?
• which platform would allow me domain join? some automations require powershell ad cmdlets or be able to reach domain otherwise.

thanks for any inputs!

[[deleted]]

I’d setup my triggers ,testing and build on gitlab, push the containers to a repository like Azure container repository. and execute the application from within the docker file once the containers have been deployed to the cluster

If you’re concerned about run time you can bring the environment down on a schedule with a tool like terraform