[Meta] Improve time-to-first-green-build

Meta issue to track ideas for improving onboarding or getting started with CI/CD pipelines, so people get their first (green) build as quickly as possible.

Ideas:

  • Detect language and suggest .gitlab-ci.yml for them (building on existing templates)
  • Detect installed components/frameworks and suggest custom .gitlab-ci.yml for their specific tests
  • Wizard/GUI for creating .gitlab-ci.yml
  • Run CI Linter when submitting .gitlab-ci.yml changes
  • CI Lint in file-tree view of .gitlab-ci.yml
  • (Better) tutorials
  • Improve instructions for install runners
  • Move autoscaler into GitLab process to remove need for first runner
  • Leverage tightly integrated container scheduler or IaaS credentials to create new runners with reasonable defaults
  • Let people run CI/CD on the GitLab instance (not advised, but might get people started faster)
  • Issues from #21624 (moved) which improve non-cached, initial runs (such as preloading runner image with common tools)

Links