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 | 2023-03-10 |
Thanks for visiting this direction page on the Runner SaaS category at GitLab. This page belongs to the Runner SaaS Group within the Verify Stage and is maintained by Gabriel Engel.
Runner SaaS is the product development effort for Runners on GitLab SaaS. Today those product offerings include:
The primary FY2024 Runner themes focus on closing critical competitive gaps with other hosted solutions and also enable Ultimate Adoption for GitLab SaaS.
In the next three months (March to May 2023) we plan to complete the following projects:
Transition our current Limited Availability macOS Runners customers from existing x86-64 to Apple Silicon (M1) on AWS.
Configure new GitLab.com Shared Runner Managers to enable the release of more GCP compute types for SaaS Runners on Linux.
We have implemented all background work to release GPU-enabled Runners for ModelOps workloads in 15.10.
In the past three months the team has setup scalable macOS SaaS Runners for testing, based on our new Taskscaler mechanism which will allow us to provide Apple Silicon (M1) machines on AWS Limited Availability and go to General Availablity later this year.
We are not actively working on the following:
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.
Organizations that use Cloud-native CI/CD solutions, such as GitLab.com, Harness.io, CircleCI, and GitHub, can run their CI/CD pipelines and get to a first green build without setting up build servers, installing and configuring build agents, or runners.
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, multiple build server and configuration options, and on-demand scale. A critical strategic goal is to deliver solutions on GitLab SaaS that meet the most stringent compliance requirements and provides methods for securely connecting the GitLab SaaS Runner platform with a customer infrastructure. This, we believe, is the approach that will unlock the most value long-term for GitLab customers.
CI build speed or time-to-result, and the related CI build infrastructure cost efficiency are now critical competitive vectors. CircleCI and Harness.io are promoting CI-build performance in their go-to-market strategy.
Other industry participants, such as GitHub, have also invested in providing more computing choices for their hosted offerings. The recent announcement by GitHub that new larger GitHub-hosted runners are now in beta, signals that the market is adopting CircleCI's position of providing more computing choices for customers that use SaaS-delivered CI/CD solutions. Finally, in recent blog posts, both GitHub and Harness.io explored the cost impact of CI build performance measured by build times on hosted solutions.
In FY24 the key focus area for achieving best-in-class is adding more GCP compute types for SaaS Runners on Linux.
Hosted Build Environment Resource Classes - non GPU enabled
| Machine Class | Machine Type/Class | GitLab | GitHub | CircleCI |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| S | 1 vCPU, 4GB RAM | Available | Not available | Available |
| M | 2 vCPUs, 8GB RAM | Available | Available | Available |
| L | 4 vCPUs, 16GB RAM | Available | Beta | Available |
| XL | 8 vCPUs, 32GB RAM | Not available | Beta | Available |
| 2XL | 16 vCPUs 64GB RAM | Not available | Beta | Available |
| 3XL | 32 vCPUs 128GB RAM | Not available | Beta | Avaiable on Windows |
| 4XL | 48 vCPUs 192GB RAM | Not available | Beta | Not available |
| 5XL | 64 vCPUs 256GB RAM | Not available | Beta | Not available |
macOS - Offer Positioning and Hosted Build Machines
| …. | GitHub | Apple - Xcode Cloud GA | CircleCI | Bitrise.io | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Positioning Statement | 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 | 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 | |
| macOS Virtual Machine Specs | 3-core CPU, 14 GB RAM | – | Medium: 4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM; Large: 8 vCPU, 16 GB RAM; Metal 12 vCPU 32 GB RAM | Standard: 4 vCPU, 19 GB RAM; Elite 8 vCPU 35 GB ram; Elite XL 12 vCPU 54 GB RAM |