We have 4 deploy jobs in the same stage that can be run concurrently. From the Gitlab docs:
The ordering of elements in stages defines the ordering of jobs' execution:
Jobs of the same stage are run in parallel.
Jobs of the next stage are run after the jobs from the previous stage complete successfully.
What happens, however, is that only one of the jobs run at a time and the others stay on pending. Is there perhaps other things that I need to do in order to get it to execute in parallel. I'm using a runner with a shell executor hosted on an Ubuntu 16.04 instance.
Your runner should be configured to enable concurrent jobs( see https://docs.gitlab.com/runner/configuration/advanced-configuration.html)
concurrent = 4
or you may want to setup several runners.