I never noticed downtime with public GitLab. It's also generally better than GitHub and Actions.
A self-hosted enterprise GitLab instance in Azure, on the other hand, has had outages and performance degradation quite a few times.
A self-hosted enterprise GitLab instance in Azure, on the other hand, has had outages and performance degradation quite a few times.
A GitLab runner is a machine/VM which can get notified of a GitLab CI job, then run the job's container image (downloading it from GitLab's container registry if necessary), then run the code in the yaml file. You get to control your build environment.
It's so weird that GitHub Actions's model is "have one absolutely gigantic container image which contains everything any build could ever need, and if something's missing, the documented answer is to apt install it every run".