You can indeed have a fully automated deployment. You could already do this with GitLab CI on an external server (S3 or anything else), but now you don't have to worry about hosting anymore.
We took inspiration from .travis.yml when designing the .gitlab-ci.yml file, but are continuing to add features and configurations that make it possible to work together with other GitLab features such as build artifacts and now Pages.
You can indeed have a fully automated deployment. You could already do this with GitLab CI on an external server (S3 or anything else), but now you don't have to worry about hosting anymore.
We took inspiration from .travis.yml when designing the .gitlab-ci.yml file, but are continuing to add features and configurations that make it possible to work together with other GitLab features such as build artifacts and now Pages.