Work with Solutions Architects to create a CI template or solution for spinning up a custom runner

Problem

Utilizing GitLabs CI runner for integration testing is very difficult. Generally cloud databases are housed within a private security group within the users VPC. In order to get access to the database you have to provide credentials directly to your GitLab runner, which is a huge barrier to adoption of GitLab's runners given the security implications of handing database credentials to a third party service. You also have to create an IP exception for GitLabs runners to allow them access to your security group, which means that any runner could access your database as long as they had credentials. It is much more secure to create a custom runner and have GitLab execute code directly within the users VPC.

That said, spinning up a custom runner is very difficult and time consuming.

Proposal

Create a walkthrough in the product to help guide administrators through an automatic process of create a custom runner within their cloud environment.

Goal

The goal of this epic is to work with the GitLab solutions architects to create an autoscaling HA runners on major cloud providers (starting with AWS). This process will be used in 13.10 for creating a UX around spinning up a custom runner.