UDUdemy
GitLab CI: Pipelines, CI/CD and DevOps for Beginners
Beginner 5 hours English Course Certificate
SkillsGitLab CICI/CDPipelinesAutomationDevOpsDeployment
Is this course right for you?
Our take
GitLab CI/CD gets a concise, practical first outing here: pipelines that test and deploy your code automatically.
It stays with the essentials rather than the whole DevOps landscape, which makes it a good quick start if your team already uses GitLab, and less useful if you're on a different CI tool or already write pipelines. GitLab has a free tier, the course is usually a few dollars on sale, and the concepts transfer even as the interface changes (as of 2026).
Comparison · LBS
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About this course
This course covers GitLab CI/CD from pipeline basics through advanced automation: writing .gitlab-ci.yml files, configuring runners, defining stages and jobs, using artifacts and caching for faster pipelines, and deploying to cloud environments.
Instructor
VD
Valentin Despa
Udemy instructor
160K+ learners4 courses4.6 instructor rating
Taught by Udemy DevOps instructors specializing in GitLab automation with enterprise CI/CD implementation experience.
Frequently asked questions
Some groundwork helps. Valentin Despa's course assumes Git basics — cloning, committing, pushing — and a little comfort with the Linux command line, since CI/CD pipelines run shell commands. You do not need prior DevOps or pipeline experience, which it builds from scratch, but being able to install tools like Docker and Node and work in a terminal will make the hands-on sections far smoother.
Building CI/CD pipelines with GitLab from the ground up: the YAML pipeline syntax, how GitLab runners execute jobs, using Docker images within pipelines, caching and performance tuning, and deploying a real application — including a Java app — to AWS. It moves from your first simple pipeline to genuinely practical deployment workflows, so you learn by shipping software rather than just studying CI/CD theory.
Both automate build-test-deploy pipelines and the core concepts transfer between them. GitLab CI/CD is part of GitLab's all-in-one platform (repo, CI/CD, issues, registry together), while GitHub Actions is tightly woven into GitHub's ecosystem and has a larger marketplace of ready-made actions. Learn whichever your team or target job uses; the pipeline thinking you build here carries over to Actions with mostly syntax differences.
Yes, for what this course needs. GitLab has a free tier with no time limit, including 400 monthly compute minutes on its shared runners, and self-hosted runners are unlimited and free. Paid Premium and Ultimate tiers add advanced security and team features for businesses, but you can learn and build real pipelines entirely on the free plan without spending anything beyond the course.
It is a paid Udemy course, usually available at a low price during Udemy's frequent sales, with lifetime access — and a version of Valentin Despa's GitLab CI teaching is also published free on freeCodeCamp's YouTube channel. So you can learn this material inexpensively or even for nothing, with the paid course adding structure and the full project walkthroughs.