I have a private gitlab instance with multiple projects and Gitlab CI enabled. The infrastructure is provided by Google Cloud Platform and Gitlab Pipeline Runner is configured in Kubernetes cluster.

This setup works very well for basic pipelines running tests etc. Now I'd like to start with CD and to do that I need some manual acceptance on the pipeline which means the person reviewing it needs to have the access to the current state of the app.

What I'm thinking is having a kubernetes deployment for the pipeline that would be executed once you try to access it (so we don't waste cluster resources) and would be destroyed once the reviewer accepts the pipeline or after some threshold.

So the deployment would be executed in the same cluster as Gitlab Runner (or different?) and would be accessible by unique URI (we're mostly talking about web-server apps) e.g. https://pipeline-58949526.git.mydomain.com

While in theory, it all makes sense to me, I don't really know how to set this up properly.

Does anyone have a similar setup? Is my view on this topic too simple? Let me know!

Thanks