How can caching and artifacts speed up AWS VPC on GitLab CI?

Caching and artifacts can significantly enhance the speed of AWS VPC deployments on GitLab CI. By storing dependencies and build artifacts, you can reduce the time taken for the CI/CD pipeline to execute, which in turn leads to faster and more efficient deployments.

Understanding Caching in GitLab CI

Caching allows you to save specific files or folders between different jobs in your pipeline. When properly configured, GitLab CI can reuse these cached items during future runs, avoiding the need to re-download or rebuild them each time.

Utilizing Artifacts in GitLab CI

Artifacts are files generated by your CI job that you want to keep after the job finishes. These can include compiled binaries, test results, or packages. By storing these artifacts, subsequent jobs can access them without needing to recreate them.

Example of Caching and Artifacts Configuration

stages:
      - build
      - deploy

    cache:
      paths:
        - vendor/
        - node_modules/

    build_job:
      stage: build
      script:
        - composer install
        - npm install
      artifacts:
        paths:
          - vendor/
          - node_modules/

    deploy_job:
      stage: deploy
      dependencies:
        - build_job
      script:
        - echo "Deploying to AWS VPC..."