Best practices to keep your Kubernetes runners moving

Sean Smith, a senior software engineer at F5 Networks, shared insights on managing GitLab CI and Kubernetes runners at GitLab Commit San Francisco, highlighting the challenges and solutions related to CI job management. F5 Networks, which handles approximately 350,000 to 400,000 CI jobs monthly, faced an incident where a coding error caused exponential job growth, threatening to overwhelm their system. To mitigate such risks, F5 implemented strategies like splitting their GitLab instance across multiple servers and using Kubernetes and Docker runners to manage workloads. Sean emphasized the importance of setting sensible resource limits to prevent excessive consumption by a few users and recommended using monitoring tools like Grafana or Prometheus for resource management. Additionally, he advised employing labels for better workload management in Kubernetes, while cautioning about their limitations. These measures, alongside establishing a robust alert system, helped F5 avoid outages and maintain system stability, illustrating the critical balance between resource constraints and user demands in DevOps practices.

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