At the moment I have a load balancer which runs a Compute Engine Instance Group which has a minimum of 1 server and a maximum of 5 servers.
This is running auto scaling and use a pre-build ubuntu template with all the base stuff needed.
When an instance boots up it will log a runner into the GitLab project, and then trigger the job to update the instance to the latest copy of the code.
This is fine and works well. The issue comes when I make a change to the git branch and push the changes, it only seems to be being picked up by one of the random 5 instances that have loaded.
I was under the impression that GitLab would push out to all the runners logged, but this doesn't seem to be the case.
I have seen answers on here that show multiple runners, but on a single server, I haven't come across my particular situation.
Has anyone come across this before? I would assume that this is a pretty normal situation, and weird that it doesn't just work.
For each job that runs in GitLab, only 1 runner receives the job. The mechanism is PULL based -- the runners constantly ask GitLab if there's any jobs available to run. GitLab never initiates communication with the runners.
Therefore, your load balancer rules do nothing to affect which runner receives a job and there is no "fairness" in distributing jobs across server. Runners will keep asking for jobs every few seconds as long as they are able to take them (according to concurrency settings in the config.toml) and GitLab will hand them out on a first-come, first-served basis.
If you set the concurrency to 1 and start multiple jobs, you should see multiple servers pick up the jobs.