Page MenuHomePhabricator

[Epic] Migrate gitlab-cloud-runner to WMCS
Open, In Progress, MediumPublic

Description

What

T403125: Investigate WMCS Magnum for GitLab runners is complete and shows that we can feasibly run gitlab-cloud-runner on WMCS using Magnum. Let's push forward with the migration from DigitalOcean to WMCS.

Why

DigitalOcean has provided us with a flexible k8s based platform for our GitLab CI runners for some time. However, maintaining a network of runners on third-party infrastructure has its downsides.

  1. Users needing to access services/resources from other WMCS projects have had to resort to using the Docker-based WMCS runners.
  2. Requests to services on the WMCS or WMF networks are subject to throttling and it has been difficult to identify/exempt traffic from DO.
  3. Email relaying (for notifications) from DO has been difficult.
  4. Service endpoints rely on non-WMF hostnames (e.g. registry.cloud.releng.team).
  5. The level of support from DO hasn't been bad per se, but with WMCS we have a dedicated WMF team to work with.

With WMCS/OpenStack Magnum we get the flexibility of a Tofu-configurable k8s provider without the above drawbacks.

Event Timeline

dduvall changed the task status from Open to In Progress.Feb 11 2026, 7:55 PM
dduvall triaged this task as Medium priority.

I owe y'all an update about Magnum!

The news is not ideal: when Magnum leadership deprecated the Heat driver they directed deployers to adopt one of two CAPI drivers 'k8s_capi_helm’ or ‘k8s_cluster_api' -- after some research I chose the k8s_capi_helm and built that out in codfw1dev.

The latest capi_helm driver is not working that great, though, and when I checked in last week with upstream Magnum folks I learned that there has been a shake up at the company that employed the capi_helm devs (Azimuth, I think?) and that those devs are no longer contributing to the project.

So... does that mean that k8s_cluster_api is the clear winner and we should switch course? It's unclear, but the magnum Project Team Gathering is next week. I will attend as many magnum meetings as I'm able and see if we're able to reach a plan for going forward. If those meetings turn out to be just me and the project leader then that will send a clear signal as well.

I will update when I know more! One way or another we will find a platform for the gitlab-runner project.