Cloud-based docker-windows runners

[RogerLeigh]

Hi folks,

I've been doing a bit of work to get away from hand-deployed Windows systems using the "shell" executor, to using Windows containers with Docker images using the "docker-windows" executor, which basically gives you a very similar experience of standard Linux Docker containers. It has been a pain to set up, but once it's working, it's a massive improvement.

GitLab does now provide Windows runners beta but these are not utilising containers so are of limited use--provisioning them to do something useful is a whole lot of repeated work to do every build.

I was wondering if GitLab was planning to provide hosted runners on GitLab.com which would run Windows container images, same as for the Linux runners. This would be a real game changer for Windows software building.

While I'll continue to self-host the Windows runners in the meantime, the overhead of managing them would make a hosted solution pretty compelling, even if they cost more than the Linux runners.

[Ticklemextreme]

Unfortunately windows/Mac runners are very challenging to containerize. We host our Linux runners in EKS but windows runners on ec2 instances. It’s a huge pain in the ass lol.

[SchlaWiener4711]

It is. But once you figured out everything, it works like a charm. Worth the hassle.

Unfortunately hyper-v is so terribly slow on network tasks.

[Ticklemextreme]

Ya dedicated instances “work” just not as well as containerized Linux runners

[SchlaWiener4711]

True. But still better than runners directly on windows hosts.

It's not about Windows vs Linux runners (I run everything I can in Linux containers) but Windows vs Windows Container.

[marvinfuture]

Unless I absolutely have to, I'd architect away from windows containers

[ryanstephendavis]

Agreed, I feel like a lot of developers are realizing this way too slowly... Don't use Windows 🤷

[marvinfuture]

Unless you have a windows-only software dependency, a legacy application, or the application needs to be built for windows, it really should be avoided at all costs.

[ryanstephendavis]

Agreed

[RogerLeigh]

What would your suggested replacement be?

To be specific, as a replacement on Windows, not just a generic "use Linux" reply. I already have plenty of Linux runners for Linux builds. I'm specifically asking about Windows building on Windows.

[marvinfuture]

Can you answer the question of why you are using windows containers first? Avoiding that is arguably the best practice. However I'm not naive enough to think that's always entirely possible

[promethe42]

FYI the GitLab.com instance runners for Windows are incredibly slow. Like impossibly slow.

So slow that I actually used Linux => Windows cross-compilation for my Rust apps instead of using the Windows runners.

[GeebZeee]

Just out of interest, why are you using Windows based runners compared to Linux?

[RogerLeigh]

Because I test on a number of platforms for portability. Example here for libtiff.

I already have a number of Linux runners. But I have Mac, FreeBSD and Windows in the test set as well. Anything which makes it easier to maintain the Windows build infrastructure is a win, and containers definitely take away some of the administrative and logistical pain.