GitLab CI/CD Associate case studies

GitLab CI/CD Associate · Put your knowledge to work in context.

The GitLab CI/CD Associate credential is aimed at engineers who build and maintain GitLab pipelines: developers who own a project's .gitlab-ci.yml, platform or DevOps engineers who maintain shared runners and templates, and test or release engineers who depend on pipeline behaviour. The subject matter falls into six practical areas. The GitLab CI/CD Associate case studies are 5 cases and about 4,160 words.

Two pipelines per push, an invalid config, and a job that ignores its own edit

Acme's platform repository runs everything from one root .gitlab-ci.yml that pulls in ci/web.yml , then ci/api.yml , then ci/deploy.yml through three include: local entries in that order. Three things are broken at once.

838 words, about 4 min 2

A protected password, a base64 leak, and a variable that will not mask

The payments team keeps PAYMENTS DB PASSWORD , a 22-character value containing ! , as a masked and protected project variable scoped to the production environment.

856 words, about 4 min 3

An 8% cache hit rate, a full artifact quota, and a six-minute deploy

A Node.js 20 monorepo builds three packages in one pipeline. default: sets the cache to key: "$CI COMMIT REF SLUG" with paths: [node modules/] , and the build job publishes dist/ as an artifact with no expire in .

830 words, about 4 min 4

A job stuck pending, two deploys racing, and a Docker daemon that is not there

An instance has four runners registered and nobody has changed the runner configuration in a quarter: docker-a (docker executor, tags docker , run untagged = false ), shell-legacy (shell executor on the production host, tags deploy , concurrent = 1 in config.toml ), k8s-small (Kubernetes executor, tags k8s , limit = 2 ), and a group runner with run untagged = true and no tags. Three problems: the unit job, which defines no tags: , sits pending for 20 minutes and then fails; two pipelines triggered 40 seconds apart both ran deploy:prod and a schema migration deadlocked against itself; and docker build inside build:image on docker-a fails with Cannot connect to the Docker daemon at tcp://docker:2375 .

823 words, about 4 min 5

No merge request pipeline, a rule that never matches, and an external contributor

A contributor pushes feature/PROJ-812 to the project (not a fork) and opens a merge request into main . The pipeline list shows exactly one pipeline, source push .

813 words, about 4 min