The following page may contain information related to upcoming products, features and functionality. It is important to note that the information presented is for informational purposes only, so please do not rely on the information for purchasing or planning purposes. Just like with all projects, the items mentioned on the page are subject to change or delay, and the development, release, and timing of any products, features or functionality remain at the sole discretion of GitLab Inc.
| Stage | Verify |
| Maturity | Viable |
| Content Last Reviewed | 2024-06-17 |
Thanks for visiting this direction page on the Hosted runners category at GitLab. This page belongs to the Hosted runners Group within the Verify Stage and is maintained by Gabriel Engel. Feel free to follow our YouTube playlist where we will upload walkthroughs of direction page updates and iteration kickoffs.
With the adoption of a DevSecOps approach and the resulting gains in developer and delivery efficiency, organizations are seeing an increased demand for computing power to run CI/CD pipelines.
Our vision is to provide a fully managed, best-in-class hosted CI/CD build infrastructure that is fast and secure by default. We want to eliminate the overhead of hosting and maintaining your build infrastructure, ultimately enabling you to deliver software faster. Our platform approach will allow you to run cross-platform (Docker containers on Linux, Windows, macOS) builds in one CI/CD pipeline. With GitLab-hosted runners, we aim to help you realize increased cost savings and efficiency by providing a reliable service for running all CI/CD builds that do not need to run on your infrastructure.
Today, the GitLab-hosted runners product offerings are:
The primary FY2025 runner themes focus on building a competitive and complete CI/CD offering that allows customers to build for all common platforms.
In addition we want to reduce operational overheads by dogfooding our new autoscaler & GRIT for our fleet of runners.
In the next three years, we want to enable enterprises, to fully focus on developing software without the hassle of managing infrastructure and make GitLab-hosted runners, to be the most widely adopted CI solution by enterprises in the market. We want to achieve this, by focusing on speed, security, and cost efficiency.
Our flagship offering will be custom-hosted runners, allowing users to create custom GitLab-hosted runners via GitLab UI, fully dedicated to their project, with more advanced features such as dedicated IP-range, or SSH access for debugging. Combined with a new pricing model, it should be a superior choice for the enterprise hosting needs.
This section will give a high-level overview of what we are currently working on. Feel free to check our FY25 roadmap planning issue or our specific iteration planning issues for more details.
In the next three months we plan to complete the following projects:
BIC (Best In Class) is an indicator of forecated near-term market performance based on a combination of factors, including analyst views, market news, and feedback from the sales and product teams. It is critical that we understand where GitLab appears in the BIC landscape.
Cloud-native CI/CD solutions, such as GitLab.com, Harness.io, CircleCI, and GitHub, allow to run CI/CD pipelines on a fully managed runner fleet with no setup required.
In addition to eliminating CI build server maintenance costs, there are other critical considerations for organizations that can migrate 100% of their CI/CD processes to a cloud-native solution. These include security, reliability, performance, compute types, and on-demand scale.
CI build speed or time-to-result, and the related CI build infrastructure cost efficiency are critical competitive vectors. CircleCI and Harness.io are promoting CI-build performance in their go-to-market strategy. Both GitHub and Harness.io explored the cost impact of CI build performance measured by build times on hosted solutions.
Hosted Linux Compute
| Size | Machine Specs | GitLab | GitHub | CircleCI |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| small | 2 vCPUs, 8GB RAM | Available | Available | Available |
| medium | 4 vCPUs, 16GB RAM | Available | Available | Available |
| large | 8 vCPUs, 32GB RAM | Available | Available | Available |
| x-large | 16 vCPUs, 64GB RAM | Available | Available | Available |
| 2x-large | 32 vCPUs, 128GB RAM | Available | Available | Available |
| 3x-large | 48 vCPUs, 192GB RAM | Not available | Available | Not available |
| 4x-large | 64 vCPUs, 256GB RAM | Not available | Available | Not available |
Hosted GPU Compute
| Size | Machine Specs | GitLab | GitHub | CircleCI |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| lite | Nvidia Tesla P4 | Not available | Not available | Available |
| standard | Nvidia Tesla T4 | Available | Available | Available |
| premium | Nvidia Tesla V100 | Not available | Not available | Available |
macOS - Offer Positioning and Hosted Build Machines
| GitLab | GitHub | Xcode Cloud | CircleCI | Bitrise.io | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Positioning statement | Hosted runners on macOS provide an on-demand macOS build environment fully integrated with GitLab CI/CD. | A GitHub-hosted runner is VM hosted by GitHub with the GitHub actions runner application installed. | A CI/CD service built into Xcode, designed expressly for Apple developers. | Industry-leading speed. No other CI/CD platform takes performance as seriously as we do. | Build better mobile applications, faster. |
| Value proposition | You can take advantage of all the capabilities of the GitLab single DevOps platform and not have to manage or operate a build environment. | When you use a GitHub-hosted runner, machine maintenance and upgrades are taken care of. | Build your apps in the cloud and eliminate dedicated build infrastructure. | The macOS execution environment allows you to test, build, and deploy macOS and iOS apps on CircleCI. | CI for mobile - save time spent on testing, onboarding, and maintenance with automated workflows and triggers |
| Available machines | Apple silicon (M1): medium | Apple silicon (M1): small+, medium+ | n/a | Apple silicon (M1): medium, large | Apple silicon (M1): medium, large; M1 Max: medium, large |