First of all: Thanks for your excellent work on GitLab! We're evaluating it currently, and it quickly replaced our SVN and TeamCity workflows for some of our projects.
I love the lightweight approach with GitLab CI, it's really easy to get started with. I currently don't miss any significant functionality, but I guess our builds are not that complex.
As we're running our complete infrastructure on Mesos/Marathon, I wonder whether it'd be possible to use the new autoscaling for the runners with Marathon instead of docker-machine. Basically, the only thing I'd need to be able to is to retrieve the registration token for the runners via a API, so that it can be passed in when the new Docker container(s) is/are spun up.
We choose docker-machine, because it also manages infrastructure, so this makes it much more easier for Administrators to manage hundred of build machines.
I'm thinking about an option to make it possible in one of the upcoming releases: how to scale gitlab-runner on other providers. You should look out for improvements in that department too!
GitLab CI is similar to Travis CI in how it works. The page lists three things about Travis CI:
1. Unfortunately it still doesn't have support for pipelines
2. only very simple builds are possible.
3. if something doesn't pass in CI you normally need to send up lots of little debugging commits to work out why it's behaving differently
GitLab CI has does the following to address this:
1. As mentioned GitLab earlier has triggers and we're working on per project pipeline views
2. Builds in GitLab can have many stages with parallelism per stage, since today you can pass build artifacts between stages and cache items https://about.gitlab.com/2016/03/29/gitlab-runner-1-1-releas...
3. You can test the runner locally with exec https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ci-multi-runner/issues/...
Please let me know what is missed and what people need that we need to add to GitLab CI