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| Stage | Verify |
| Maturity | Complete |
| Content Last Reviewed | 2023-09-11 |
Thanks for visiting this direction page on the Runner Fleet category at GitLab. This page belongs to the Runner Group within the Verify Stage and is maintained by Darren Eastman.
Organizations that adopt the GitLab one DevSecOps platform approach realize significant gains in development and delivery efficiency. And with GitLab's new AI/ML feature sets, we expect an order of magnitude increase in developer efficiency and reduced time to market for software-enabled technology changes. Some GitLab customers plan and operate computing for CI/CD jobs (a Runner Fleet) that can scale to manage millions of CI/CD jobs monthly.
Our vision is that as customers more deeply integrate AI into their development processes, they can efficiently and cost-effectively configure and manage a GitLab Runner Fleet at scale on any public or private cloud platform.
In many customer interviews, a recurring set of questions as customers more fully adopt and expand the use of GitLab CI/CD in their organization are how to plan, manage and optimize the Runner Fleet to support the growth in CI/CD usage. Invariably customers ask for best practices for setting up and managing a Runner Fleet. So while the FY24 focus is on delivering best-in-class observability for managing CI/CD build environments, in FY25, we focus on the following themes: Fleet Planning, Fleet Cost Visibility, and Fleet Optimization.
The FY24 product themes for Runner Fleet aligned with GitLab's FY24 product investment themes are as follows.
World-class DevSecOps experience:
The Runner Fleet Dashboard MVC, a component of GitLab's observability, analytics, and feedback FY24 product investment theme, is the primary goal for FY24. The MVC will include metrics for fleet health, top active runners, and runner queue wait times for CI/CD jobs. While the initial MVC will ship in the Admin Area view, in subsequent releases, we intend to roll out the Fleet Dashboard to the group level - specifically the top-level group for an organization.
By surfacing these metrics in the UI and then building automation that uses this data, we will significantly reduce developer wait time and time to result while optimizing infrastructure costs for the CI build environment.
This is a multi-step journey; we will learn new information and incorporate new customer insights as we move forward. A critical guiding principle from observability to automation is that we will always focus on essential jobs to be done and the voice of the customer. So while we envision a solution beyond static observability, customer feedback will clearly inform the future evolution, especially as we transition to automation.
In the next three months (September to November) we are focused on the following:
Runner Fleet Dashboard
Runner Fleet Dashboard
In the past three months, we have shipped the following key features: (June, July, August)
Runner Fleet Dashboard
In the near term, (September to November ) we are not focused on design or development efforts to improve Runners usability in CI/CD settings at the project level. While improvements in this view could be valuable to the software developer persona, our primary target personas for Runner Fleet in FY24 are, the Platform Engineer and the Infrastructure Operator personas.
BIC (Best In Class) is an indicator of forecasted 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.
At GitLab, a critical challenge is simplifying the administration and management of a CI/CD build fleet at an enterprise scale. This effort is one foundational pillar to realizing the vision of AI-optimized DevOps. Competitors are also investing in this general category. Earlier this year GitHub announced a new management experience that provides a summary view of GitHub-hosted runners. This is a signal that there will be a focus on reducing maintenance and configuration overhead for managing a CI/CD build environment at scale across the industry.
We also now see additional features on the GitLab public roadmap signaling an increased investment in the category we coined here at GitLab, 'Runner Fleet.' These features suggest that GitHub aims to provide a first-class experience for managing GitHub Actions runners and include features in the UI to simplify runner queue management and resolve performance bottlenecks. With this level of planned investment, it is clear that there is recognition in the market that simplifying the administrative maintenance and overhead of the CI build fleet is critical for large customers and will help enable deeper product adoption.
Indirect competitor Actutated is the first solution that we have seen whose product includes a dashboard for Runners and build queue visibility. This is another strong signal that providing solutions that reduce the CI/CD build infrastructure's management overhead is valuable for organizations with mature DevOps practices.
To ensure that our GitLab customers can fully realize the value of GitLab's product vision, we must provide solutions that eliminate the complexities, manual tasks, and operational overhead and reduce the costs of delivering a CI build environment at scale.
The key capabilities that we hear from customers describing fleet management pain points are as follows:
In FY 2024, the critical focus area for achieving best-in-class is delivering the new Fleet management experience for observability, including Runner queue wait times and fleet health metrics.
Runner Fleet is still a nascent category; competitors like GitHub are beginning to invest in this area. On their future roadmap, GitHub plans to introduce seamless management of GitHub-hosted and self-hosted runners. This feature aims to deliver a "single management plane to manage all runners for a team using GitHub." GitHub also plans to offer Actions Performance Metrics to provide organizations with deep insights into critical CI/CD performance metrics. One example of how the cloud infrastructure market can evolve is Active Assist for Google Cloud - a solution to optimize cloud operations cost reduction. Therefore we can imagine a future where Microsoft and GitHub bring to market AI-based solutions that integrate GitHub Actions with infrastructure on Azure. Our GitLab competitive position is solid in that we will continue to invest in features and capabilities to ensure that customers can use GitLab Runners efficiently on any cloud provider.