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Comment by wongarsu

20 hours ago

I'd also say that gitlab runners are the biggest failure point in gitlab and take some work to micro-manage. If I was setting up from scratch I would consider gitlab for source control, but some hosted service for CI

Really? I've been very happy with how easy GitLab Runners are to manage. We were running 20,000 jobs a week on 6 bare metal boxes and we had tons of spare capacity. Simple Ansible script to deploy the runner and register it. Tags for t-shirt sizes to set the amount of CPU/memory allocated to each job container.

Maybe running on Kubernetes or some autoscaling solution is more painful.

  • When it works, it's great. When it doesn't, good luck figuring out why.

    When you fork a project, it's really not clear in the UI why it's stalling (because it uses your configured runner, i.e. none, not the project's).

    When a runner fails, it's not really clear why. gitlab-runner logs are mostly useless in terms of connectivity to the gitlab instance, displaying what projects/repos it's effectively associated with. And i don't think it even has a simple test command to test the docker setup, you just have to trigger jobs until it fails in the middle of hundreds of lines of logs.

Maybe give https://rocketrunner.io a try? We made super easy and fully managed GitLab CI/CD runners for GitLab.com or self-hosted GitLab servers :-)

(Sorry for posting this twice, but we'd really love to get more user feedback)