Gitlab Runners at Scale as a Service

on YouTube ↗35m

" summary

Built a Fleet-style GitLab runners-as-IaaS that uses the GitLab Instance Executor with a Terraform module + Packer-built AMIs to autoscale EC2 executors, support instance and Docker executors, mount S3/EFS/FSx, and export reproducible images; it runs ~350K jobs/month, sustains up to 25k parallel capacity (peak 3k), spans ~40 AWS accounts and reports cost-by-job via DataDog. Known issues: customers struggle with Terraform/Packer, inter-layer versioning, and chronic overprovisioning; plan is a UI to abstract Terraform and image management.

AI-written summary · about

" chapters (11)

1. 0:00Introduction
2. 1:29Managing GitLab runners
3. 5:46Scalable runner requirements
4. 7:51Fleeting runners plugin
5. 10:43Fleeting runners architecture
6. 13:08Fleeting runners features
7. 21:07Observability and cost
8. 25:51Current challenges
9. 29:28Future vision
10. 32:41Closing remarks
11. 33:26Q&A

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