Cloud Native CI/CD with GitLab

Runners: The Platform for CI/CD Pipelines

If you take a look at any of the jobs executed in our pipelines, you will see that they are executed by a "runner". Here is a log of a job executed in a pipeline:

Running with gitlab-runner 17.0.0~pre.88.g761ae5dd (761ae5dd)
...
Cleaning up project directory and file based variables
Job succeeded

In the job output above, gitlab-runner is the runner that executed the job.

A runner is a lightweight, highly-scalable agent written in Go that runs the jobs in the pipeline. Users can use the GitLab default runners, which are hosted by GitLab if you're using gitlab.com as your CI/CD instance, or they can set up their own runners. Runners are what allow GitLab to run multiple jobs in parallel and to scale the CI/CD infrastructure. They also allow users to run jobs on their own infrastructure using SSH, Docker, Kubernetes, or other methods. Runners can be set and managed in the GitLab UI by the administrator of the project.

By default, GitLab provides 400 CI/CD minutes per month at no cost, which are executed on GitLab's runners. If your projects require more minutes, you have the option to purchase a subscription that increases the available CI/CD minutes or alternatively, you can set up your own dedicated runners to handle your CI/CD pipelines. Below is a detailed comparison of the various GitLab subscription plans and the corresponding number of CI/CD minutes included with each: