GitLab introduces new machine types for GitLab SaaS Linux Runners
Our GitLab SaaS vision is to provide a solution where you can easily choose and use the correct type of public cloud-hosted compute resources for your CI/CD jobs. In this first iteration towards achieving that vision, we are pleased to announce that two larger compute machines are generally available for GitLab SaaS Runners on Linux.
With these two machine types, you can now access more choices for your GitLab SaaS CI/CD jobs. And with 100% job isolation on an ephemeral virtual machine, and security and autoscaling fully managed by GitLab, you can confidently run your critical CI/CD jobs on GitLab SaaS.
The new SaaS Runners on Linux are a 2 vCPU, 8GB RAM (saas-linux-medium-amd64), and a 4 vCPU, 16GB RAM (saas-linux-large-amd64) machine type. These machine types, powered by the latest generation of Google Compute N2D virtual machines, deliver significant performance improvements for general-purpose CI workloads. The medium machine type is available to all subscriptions, with the large machine type available to customers with Premium and Ultimate subscriptions.
The answer is that it depends. If the CI job is compute-intensive, you will likely see a performance improvement measured by reduced build times. We ran a series of Linux kernel builds on the medium machine type to test the potential performance gains for compute-intensive CI jobs.
