Limiting jobs sharing a resource (making resource_group a counting semaphore ?)

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Proposal

resource_group introduced in Gitlab 12.7 allows only one job that acquire the resource like a binary semaphore or a mutex. Ref. It would be benefical if number of resources can be changed, not fixed to one.

Why?

I am using CI to compile the projects. In some cases, some compilers are licensed and we have some number of, say n, floating licenses. I would like to limit total number of jobs using the license to n. However the resource limit scope should not be limited to project level (I think current resource_group scope is project level), user should be able to set scope of the resource to project/group/global level.

Example

A possible description can be:

job1:
  script: deploy
  resource_group:
   - name: production
     # if not set, default is 1. In this case, 3 simultaneous jobs can be run
     count: 3
     # if not set, default is project. Possible values: project, group, global
     scope: group

The correct place for settings may not be the .gitlab-ci.yml. What if two projects set different count values for the same resource in their YAML files? Correct place to set the limit can be web interface.

I don't know how many users can benefit from this proposal. My need is to limit number of jobs at group or global level sharing some number of limited resources.

Thanks.

feature