Case Study: U.S. Army Cyber School achieves Courseware as Code and faster CI-driven reviews with GitLab

How the U.S. Army Cyber School created “Courseware as Code” with GitLab

The U.S. Army Cyber School faced the challenge of building a secure, single platform for Git and CI to replace scattered content on laptops, Zip files, and whiteboards and to support both students and instructors. The school adopted GitLab (GitLab Ultimate) to establish "Courseware as Code" and a unified DevOps workflow for creating and maintaining course material and assessments.

GitLab enabled the school to convert nearly all course content to markdown, run CI/CD pipelines (including automated grading and GitLab Pages for exam results), and use Issues, Boards, Epics, and templates to manage multi‑instructor, distributed courses. As a result, review cycles fell from three years to one month, six courses were created, there have been 8,415 commits and over 4,000 merges, and the central repository eliminated prior data‑exfiltration risks while preparing students with real‑world DevOps skills.

U.S. Army Cyber School

Chris Apsey

Captain