Nowadays, software development teams utilize continuous delivery or some variation, to create better, faster, more accurate software releases. Continuous delivery is a DevOps practice that empowers software teams to continuously ship code directly to an environment once automated tests pass. Continuous delivery is facilitated through the deployment pipeline. You can read more about it in a previous post.

GitLab CI/CD is a tool that is built into GitLab. It allows you to create automated tasks that you can use to form a Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery / Deployment process. You configure GitLab CI/CD by adding a yaml file (called `.gitlab-ci.yml`) to your source repository. This file creates a pipeline, which will then run when a code change is pushed to the repository. Pipelines are made up of a series of stages, and each stage can each contain a number of jobs or scripts.

The standard Command Line Interface for Kubernetes (kubectl) is a very powerful tool for debugging or monitoring purposes. It is very inefficient, but just if you want to get a high-level overview of your Kubernetes cluster or want to work with multiple resources at the same time. A large number of graphical Kubernetes dashboards exist today and chances are that you already used the default Kubernetes dashboard or the one that comes with your cloud provider.