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BackGitLab Runners in the Cloud
Cloud computing is suitable for many areas of application, and its benefits are particularly discernible when computing power and storage space only need to be used temporarily, such as for software tests and deployments with GitLab. Our Ansible playbook and step-by-step instructions will help you to use GitLab runners on the cloudscale.ch infrastructure while benefiting from maximum performance with minimum costs.
Periodic peaks due to integration tests
Automated software tests make sense and are indispensable in many scenarios. At defined times or for defined events, e.g. when pushing code changes, test suites are started that will, ideally, confirm that all test cases are running successfully and might be directly followed by a productive deployment. Any errors found serve as early and meaningful feedback about where corrections are still required.
More complex test configurations may be fairly resource-intensive and require high-performance infrastructure, especially when engineers need the test results in order to continue with their work. In-between test runs, however, the test infrastructure is idle. This is where the cloud offers a way of avoiding unnecessary costs: when required, resources are made available at extremely short notice; once tests have been completed, the infrastructure and the associated costs can immediately be reduced again.
Your own dynamic test setup
Our Ansible playbook will support you as you create your own test setup, which only requires very few resources for day-to-day operation and automatically draws on resources from our cloud during test runs. Even if your tests are extremely demanding and require runners of correspondingly large dimensions, the resources are deleted again after the test run and only incur low costs due to our to-the-second billing.
The Ansible playbook assumes that you want to install the whole setup with all its components from scratch. If you already have, for example, a GitLab instance or a runner or would like to adjust other installation details individually, the accompanying instructions we have provided for a manual setup will help you install the components you want.
Thanks to automatic scaling and billing by the second, you can make the most of the cloud with resources that are available exactly when you need them and that you only pay for during this time. Test setups with GitLab runners and their typically short, but intensive workloads benefit particularly here, and you can install them in a flash with our Ansible playbook and the corresponding instructions.
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Your cloudscale.ch team