GitLab CI/CD, 16 Sep 2019

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From YouTube: [2019 Q3] Experience Baseline for Runner: Runner Concept Discovery / Understanding

Description

Runner Concept Discovery Walkthrough. Recorded by Juan J. Ramirez (jramirez@gitlab.com)

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All right, so this is the runner discovery experience. So basically, the idea used to explore a little bit how a user of deed lab discovers the runner experience or like the runner concept itself, when they are navigating a project winning kid lock open. They are setting up a project with a grid lab. So what I'm gonna do right now is I'm gonna set up a new project.

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This is gonna load, the new project setup screen and what I'm, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna create a cake tester too, because I already have another one and I'm gonna, not initialized this with a readme I'm, just gonna, create it.

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Alright, so here it here's, one interesting thing like this is already created. There's all this setup, which for someone who is a developer, this is a basically like a very easy important, important experience for from your get experience. However, at this point you serve realizing that there's not a lot of things going on when it comes to like onboarding the user into the see I experience right. So, although the CI it's kind of like baked in into the experience of your whole gitlab end to end.

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Experience you are not really seeing it here besides setting up for the repo, so that's kind of interesting Lee we're gonna, create a file quickly, so I'm gonna create the file and then I'm, just gonna call this txt and commit the changes all right. So now these has been successfully created if I go back to my repo.

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Sorry, if I go back to my project, details now, I have other stuff to look at. So here's a couple of interesting things: there's the enable outer devups they are in the current coronaries cluster and there's the setups the ICD so because I'm kinda like doing this from the perspective of a user who's onboarding, which kind of like getting set up with a kid lab, I'm gonna, do what I think it's naturally like the first intention, which is like setting up the CI CD. So when you do that this happens.

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So this is kind of interesting because, like it's taking you to the file composer with a get lopsy ie a model template applied.

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But what's interesting is there's no context right now. What's going on, it's basically we're telling the users like here's, your kid lab CI mo file, but like there's, really no context of what you are supposed to create. However, if you apply the template, you open to apply the template, then you'll see that there's like several options to do these so, let's say I'm doing a hexa project. Hexyl is a static HTML builder.

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So if I do that, then, like this shows up like this, is our video are a little bit better in terms of introducing the concept. So it says that this file is a template, that it might need some editing.

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It gives you like some.

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Address to PC and learn about what's hexyl, but that's pretty much it it's like. You see this Rukhsana son, like if you're kind of like familiar with the mo. You already know like a little bit of what's going on if you're moving from another bill agent, like Jenkins, for instance, for circle CI, you might also know a little bit of what's going on, but like definitely, this could be better. This is like this is a moment of the experience of the experience where you're really not entirely sure.

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What's going on right, like it's a there's like some things being set up for you, but you're definitely not fully boarded into what's the get like get lap, Zi mo file and, of course, you're not like oh I got this point, you're, not necessarily familiar with the concept of CI within within get la that's interesting, because until this point, like the the github CI mo file, is very relevant to the runner concept. But until this point we haven't been exposed to the runner concept.

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Yet so, hopefully the interesting thing is that, like for my user perspective, you want to set up something in your CI, CD I. Think it's kinda, like you start like gravitating to things that say say: CI CD like there can I list it with the CI CD strength somewhere.

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So in this particular case from the sidebar, you will see that there's a top level hierarchy object which is called CI CD and it has pipelines, jobs schedules charts, so I might, as a user kind of gravitate to that I like start clicking a little bit there around there. So I'm gonna leave these, and this is actually a little bit better in terms of getting onboard imported into that CIC. The experience I'm not gonna, start with a pipeline.

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Yet let's assume that I'm just kinda like I, just want to run some jobs right if I go to jobs, I'm gonna click these. It says that there are no jobs to show so like it's kind of interesting, because now I'm kinda, starting to understand that there's no relationship between setting up the pipeline and like the jobs are run within the pipeline. So basically, this is telling me you need you need a pipeline for a job again until these pointers there's no indication of the runner concept.

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Yet, if you click QuickStart, this actually takes you to documentation or you can start getting a little bit of context of what's the runner. So if we do a vine here, you're going to see that the runner concept is mentioned several times and it's kind of explained briefly.

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One interesting thing is that they are telling you here. So in brief, the steps needed to have a working CI can be some app to add in a grid lab see IML to the root directory of your repository and configuring. The runner right so the interesting here is that, like they are kind of like telling you oh yeah, go I'll work with the runner, but the runner concept. This is still not like fully disclosed.

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So that's kind of interesting because at this point, like I already know like okay there's something that's called the runner, maybe I want to set up these. Maybe I want to do something with these, so where do I find that right? So the discoverability until this point is not great in that in the that aspect, so I'm going to go back to the details, I really tried these. These took me to the to the template over the gitlab CIE Yama file.

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There's this thing called enable outer DevOps, which, as a user I, gravitate towards that as well and there's also the acute or Nettie's cluster, which I also may gravitate towards that, because there's a really kind of like an assumption that if you wanna run isolated tests like you, you might need to bring like your own kubernetes cluster or your own container to run these things.

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I took so at this point, there's already kind of like a little bit of like bridging between the concept of the CI and like the things that you need to set up to run. Your C and I like this thing, definitely like grab the attention in terms of setting up that experience. So what I'm going to do is I'm just gonna. Add that cue Burnett is closed for, because so one explore what's going on there right and that's interesting. It takes me to our enoch unites cluster.

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There's a lot of context of why this is needed, like it tells you that you can use to review abs, you pull your applications right, your run, your pipelines, okay, there's a little bit of things going on there. That, like give me an idea that this is necessary to actually do see, I wouldn't get loved, but still it's not fully telling me anything about like the runner concept, so the runner concept. Until this point it's a little bit hidden.

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We're gonna, try one last thing here which is enabling out-of-the-box right. So if I do this this, interestingly, this takes me to the settings of the CI CD. So until this point this is kind of the first time that you discover that discover. There are some concepts like there are some particularly scope things within the settings here right and one of those things is CI CD, so like from a discoverability point of view, it's kind of hard to tell that that exists stir.

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But let's say that, because of these out of there, ups Patrick tube now I know about these, and now I can start exploring a little bit of these settings and then the runners concept shows up one once again here.

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So that's interesting because at this point like I'm, seeing it but still very vague right like there's, register and see you runners from this project, I guess that that's kind of like interesting we use on the documentation. We saw that setting up the runner was kind of like part of the setting up that CI experience, but yeah not a lot of context, not as much as. If you do like these writing you can you actually have on that particular thing that I clicked for variables.

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You have like documentation into that so right away, you can see that that's basically like low-hanging fruit, like we could add more explanation of, what's going on there for runners, I'm, going to expand it and when I expanded, there's more context to see you right, like there's a little bit of an explanation now like one that it's actually gonna explain a little bit of what the runner is.

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So it's gonna say that the runners process, which runs a job you can set up as many runners as you need runners, can be placed on separate users servers on even on your local machine.

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So a lot of interesting things there and there's like the concept of the active and pause runners right. So you go down here and.

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It's also very vague at this point, like the it starts getting kinda like circling back to that Cuban Eddie's concept, that I was trying to explore before.

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So you see it here, it's telling you that you can install a runner on a Cuban, Eddie's cluster, so basically they're telling you all I can you can use cubes to basically use runner, but again it's not very clear what runner is doing or what's gonna do for you in terms or like from the perspective of the CI and then there's like more more specific things like registering like runners manually, there's the concept of the show runners with which, like basically for a person who has used the free tier of get lap that come the host version, they're, probably already gonna, have a little bit of an understanding of what's going on because, like basically, we are doing CI on a free project.

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It's running on the shirt runners at this point, you're gonna see that there's like eight shirt runners, but again it's kind of big concepts going on here. One thing that would like grabs my attention is this ID and then these other ID. So there are two IDs to identifiers, not very clear what you're doing or what they're supposed to be signifying or indicated in terms of the experience that it lab provides for the CI and the things that I need to set up.

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The URL is kind of pretty straightforward because at this point, like you understand that you are like basically, this is like the location of that runner. It's um all abuse to the fact that you also have runners coming from other locations right, like from your local machine from a cubes cluster. So like there's, there's some interesting things there as well, but yeah like that's, that's, perhaps more clear, but the IDS are not that clear and then the other thing that it's not really clear is the tax.

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So the tax you can infer some things from the attacks like you know that this is like using docker like this is using GCE. So like you, and you can also see some things like East Sea. So, like that's running in a particular song, you like, if you are using AWS or Google Cloud like is this kind of like nomenclature, already tells you a little bit of like oh that's, running in certain availability zone or region, but again like there's things that are not necessarily very straightforward, like like.

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What's get annex if I'm, not pretty good with git yet or like I'm, not an expert on git I might not understand. What's going on with that particular key to annex tag so like from a very high-level perspective, these things are.

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Kind of easy to infer, but it's not necessarily clear. What's going on with these things, you know like it's uh like like as a first time user I will be curious if what the Rob ruby tag is telling me is that if my project has ruvie, it's only gonna run on the shirt runner right like now. We want possibility, but another possibility is that I don't know. This is all runner that it's I don't know. This is a runner that has like more capabilities than all the runners right.

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There's this kid lab org runner like that's an interesting one, because it makes you think, like okay, there's, there's something, maybe with the hole with the self-managed version of the get lab implementation that that is kind of like related to this runner right, like so a lot of vague kind of like on here, concepts which interesting and then there's this concept of group runners, which kind of hidden on the bottom, and it tells you good luck. Group runners can execute code for all the projects in this group. It can be managed using the runners API.

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So that's interesting because, like there's another concept that is showing up here, which is the runners API, probably probably what I would do at this point as a user is just a search for Runner and get lab, then it's gonna show documents and then it's probably gonna be the best place for me to get exposed to the runner concept. So I'm actually gonna find a lot of extra details here right but still doesn't feel like a very streamlined process. There wasn't mentioned to the guid lab runner api.

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I don't know if that's necessarily on that documentation so like. If you go here, you actually find that there's documentation for the runners api so a little bit of a disconnect there in terms of documentation and how you find things so yeah, but the experience so far is not necessarily the best in terms of discovery, and I think there's many things that could be done to improve this experience so yeah. I look forward to working on those things and hopefully start improving some of these flows very soon.

A

Thanks for watching.