Re: out of CI pipeline minutes again

[Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>]

On 2/23/23 16:33, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 23, 2023 at 03:28:37PM +0000, Ben Dooks wrote:
>> On Thu, Feb 23, 2023 at 12:56:56PM +0000, Peter Maydell wrote:
>>> Hi; the project is out of gitlab CI pipeline minutes again.
>>> In the absence of any other proposals, no more pull request
>>> merges will happen til 1st March...
>>
>> Is there a way of sponsoring more minutes, could people provide
>> runner resources to help?
> 
> IIUC, we already have available compute resources from a couple of
> sources we could put into service. The main issue is someone to
> actually configure them to act as runners *and* maintain their
> operation indefinitely going forward. The sysadmin problem is
> what made/makes gitlab's shared runners so incredibly appealing.

Indeed, that's the main issue.  Now that GNOME is hosting 
download.qemu.org, we have much more freedom about how to use the 
credits that we get from the Azure open source sponsorship program. 
Currently we only have 2 VMs running but we could even reduce that to 
just one.

Using the Kubernetes executor for GitLab would be both cheap and 
convenient because we would only pay (use sponsorship credits) when the 
CI is in progress.  Using beefy containers (e.g. 20*16 vCPUs) is 
therefore not out of question.  Unfortunately, this is not an easy thing 
to set up especially for people without much k8s experience.

Paolo