Add notes on problems using GitLab for Continuous Integration

[svenvanderburg]

Since a while you need a creditcard to run gitlab-ci. We should add notes on how to work around this when teaching the lesson with GitLab.

[svenvanderburg]

@luisaforozco you are the expert on this right? Would you be able to pick it up? Or at least drop some notes here?

[luisaforozco]

For the lesson that we thought we decided to move to Github.

Other possible solutions that we had in mind were:

1. Letting the organization create the gitlab runners in their machines (from an university for example) and then add all participants to that organization, granting them access to use the gitlab runner.
2. If there are not university machines for gitlab runners, maybe one could use amazon machines?
3. Every participant could host the gitlab runner in their own machine? -> This requires quite some effort for the setup.

[mkuzak]

Thank you, @luisaforozco. This is very helpful. I put together the information above and some extra information from our conversation. Do you agree with the following description?

Teaching CI/CD with GitLab requires access to runners. The available options are:

1. Use public instance. To gain access to runners, learners need to add their credit card number to their account. We cannot make it a requirement for participating in training.
2. Use institutional instance. Runners are not available by default and must be enabled per user account. There are two options for setting up runners:
   a. Connecting to the local compute (cloud, cluster etc.)
   b. Connecting to one of the cloud providers (Azure, Amazon EC2, Google Cloud)
3. Set up local runners on learners’ laptops. That would require considerable preparation time.