GitLab to service on-demand CI runners delivery

Developer often have limited access to exotic OSes like windows to run a build for their project. Getting such machines requires extra effort. GitLab.com could integrate with cloud providers to allow spawning runner machine on own defined tags - so drop-in-replacement for own runner. Kind of ad-hoc buying private machines runners. Cloud when paid for a time of a build will be usually pretty cheap so there is margin for GitLab to charge for private runners delivery. To make it useful it would need to be easy to pay for, thus payment protocols like bitcoin could be used to make it work, it can be used by GitLab on the fly just to monetize fiat currency and pay to cloud provider, reducing the security costs related to storing bitcoins. There is brand new chromium based web browser https://brave.com which has a BTC wallet built-in to pay from your browser to websites directly. I would love to use it on GitLab.com or my local gitlab instance to spawn in cloud machines for windows and macosx runners when I need to, instead of managing virtualbox. It is not just more robust CI/CD but reduced effort on managing exotic OSes. Can be used as a premium scaling factor comparing to currently public runners. Potentially it is a new income from runners delivery, not just for GitLab.com but also any running instances.

Edited Jun 25, 2025 by 🤖 GitLab Bot 🤖
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