Advanced GitLab and DevOps Training

For IT leaders: Teams that rely on GitLab SaaS alone often hit limits around source-code security, secrets handling, and how well GitLab works with the rest of the DevOps toolchain. This course shows your DevOps engineers how to self-host GitLab on private infrastructure with their own firewall rules. It also covers publishing GitLab securely through Cloudflare Tunnels and moving CI/CD credentials into HashiCorp Vault, all of which supports risk reduction and audit conversations.

Role fit: The course is built for DevOps engineers and platform or infrastructure practitioners. Motivated junior staff facing complex GitLab problems can also take it. It assumes learners already know GitLab basics and can stand up a Linux server.

Time investment: About 9.3 hours across 10 skills of roughly one hour each. Team leads can assign individual skills (for example, Terraform, Ansible, or Kubernetes GitOps) to match current projects.

Change-management notes:

• The Vault integration requires a GitLab Premium or Ultimate license, so plan for a trial or a single license.
• Demos use DigitalOcean, AWS, and Cloudflare, and are shown on Windows with PowerShell. Steps will vary by cloud provider.
• Administration topics include shared runners, Prometheus and Grafana monitoring, and Rake-based health checks, which are directly useful for teams running production instances.

The first skill, Deploy GitLab on Self-Hosted Infrastructure, is free, so Team Leads can preview the material before assigning seats.

IT teams complete this training to run GitLab as a secure, integrated hub for their DevOps toolchain rather than an isolated SaaS repo. The scenarios mirror real production work: self-hosting GitLab on private infrastructure so source code and infrastructure-as-code configurations stay behind your own firewall rules, then connecting it to Kubernetes, Ansible, Terraform, and HashiCorp Vault.

• Lower source-code exposure risk: Your team will deploy and administer self-hosted GitLab, publish it securely through Cloudflare Tunnels, and move pipeline credentials into HashiCorp Vault using JWT authentication and role-based policies instead of scattering secrets across projects.
• Fewer manual deployments: Practitioners build GitOps workflows that push container image changes to Kubernetes through the GitLab agent, and run Terraform and Ansible from CI/CD pipelines, including separate Terraform state for dev and production environments with deployment history and logs.
• Faster troubleshooting and less downtime: Admins use Ruby Rake tasks to validate LDAP, email, and app server health, set up shared runners, and connect Prometheus and Grafana to monitor instances that many users depend on.
• Reusable automation: Engineers script GitLab through the REST API with PowerShell and use the GraphQL API to pull users, projects, and issues in a single request, which cuts repetitive admin work.

Note for Team Leads: the Vault integration requires a GitLab Premium or Ultimate license.

Knowledge

• Why teams self-host GitLab instead of using SaaS: applying your own firewall rules and security controls to protect source code and infrastructure-as-code configurations
• How a self-hosted GitLab architecture fits together: the GitLab server, separate GitLab runner VMs for CI/CD jobs, and a Cloudflare Tunnel agent for secure remote access and TLS
• When to use the GitLab REST API and when to use the GraphQL API, including how GraphQL can return related resources such as projects and issues in a single request
• How GitOps deployments to Kubernetes work with the GitLab agent, Helm charts, and private container images
• How GitLab CI/CD pipelines run infrastructure-as-code tools, including Ansible playbooks and Terraform with separate dev and production state
• How HashiCorp Vault integrates with GitLab through JWT authentication, roles, policies, and the KV v2 secrets engine, and why this integration requires a Premium or Ultimate license

Ability

• Deploy a self-hosted GitLab instance on a cloud VM, configure DNS and TLS, and monitor system health with tools like btop
• Administer GitLab by registering shared runners, setting up webhook integrations, and exposing metrics to Prometheus and Grafana
• Validate server health, LDAP connectivity, and email configuration with GitLab Rake tasks during troubleshooting
• Automate GitLab resource management with PowerShell against the REST API, and run GraphQL queries and mutations
• Build CI/CD pipelines that provision cloud VMs with Ansible and Terraform, and track deployment history by environment
• Configure pipelines to retrieve secrets from HashiCorp Vault so credentials are not stored in project code