22–25 Sept 2025
GW1 Uni Bremen
Europe/Berlin timezone

Ephemeral VMs for GitLab CI on your own Hardware

25 Sept 2025, 10:00
20m
Raum B0080 (GW1, Uni Bremen)

Raum B0080

GW1, Uni Bremen

Vortrag (10 min + 5 min) Gemeinsamer Teil

Speaker

Sebastian Wagner (Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY)

Description

A subset of continous integration workflows requires privileges typically unavailable in container-based GitLab runner environments. What if, instead of granting users access to privileged runners, one could supply them with a fresh VM for each build?
Past approaches featured maintaining a pool of VMs at a cloud provider or a local OpenStack instance. In this talk I present an alternative approach to this problem which does not depend on the presence of such platforms. A custom-developed plugin enables autoscaling ephemeral Linux VMs on local hardware, filling a gap in the options available for local workflow execution. Initial tests have shown promising performance improvements compared to other local implementations and hint towards applications beyond the container build process.
The talk outlines the technical implementation, initial testing results and discusses the solution's fitness for various use cases.

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Author

Sebastian Wagner (Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY)

Presentation materials