In T339352: Create MySQL container in CI for integration tests, we used the services: key in GitLab CI to define a mariadb service for CI jobs for iPoid-Service. (That also involved safe-listing this image in the operations/puppet repo; see T339352 for the relevant patches.)
However, now that I want to write integration tests which make use of the MariaDB container, I find that I get "Connection refused" errors. After installing iputils-ping, it looks like the container used for tests (nodejs16-slim) can't reach the mariadb host.
We need to be able to connect to the MariaDB container in order to have CI for integration tests (T339846: Write integration tests for data import and updates, T344802: Add tests for importing and updating data scripts called from main.sh)
Previous discussion for how one might connect to a DB from GitLab CI was in T308789#7990694, but I believe that since that conversation (June 2022) we've moved in the direction of using the services option in GitLab CI.