GitLab Next

1. We'll add compute platform credentials (DO) to the admin settings so GitLab can autoscale CI without needing to setup a runner.
2. Support the other platform credentials that supported by Docker Machine
3. Reuse this functionality for dev, deploy, pages
4. Add support for schedulers (Kubernetes)

Currently we require a user to:

1. Have or create VM
2. Login to VM
3. Find GitLab Runner installation docs
4. Copy & paste commands
5. Type gitlab-runner register
6. Copy & paste URL
7. Copy & paste token

It takes a long time, and too many clicks in my opinion.

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Maybe we could add a button: Launch VM.

1. User clicks Launch VM. Gets redirected to https://cloud.digitalocean.com/droplets/new and has the VM creation form filled.
2. Add SSH key (if doesn't have)
3. Choose hostname (if doesn't like existing one)
4. Click create
5. Wait around 2 minutes to start building a project.

How it would work:

1. We would fill the user-data (cloud-init) with GitLab Runner installation and registration commands.
2. User would have to wait some time.
3. We could send an e-mail that your runner is registered and you can start using it.

However, Digital Ocean doesn't allow to pre-fill user-data. They considering that: https://twitter.com/digitalocean/status/715557008603267073.

The nice thing about this approach would be that we would not require any API tokens to put into GitLab. Since we don't want to manage the machines we don't need to. We want to ease the process of launching VM with Runner. This would work well on GitLab.com and as well on-premise installations.

What do you think? @sytses @JobV @grzesiek @tmaczukin