Comparison
Build pipelinevsPipeline runner
Build pipeline
a merge triggers a sequence of stages on someone else's machine, and the sequence is now the only way anything reaches production.
The automated sequence that turns a commit into a tested, published artefact and then into a deployment. It is infrastructure in its own right — it has uptime, capacity, credentials and a blast radius — and it is usually the most privileged system a team operates while receiving the least operational attention. Its slowness is a direct tax on every change, which is why build time is a reliability metric rather than a convenience one.
Full entry →Pipeline runner
the job waits in a queue because every machine that could run it is busy, and nobody thinks of that as capacity.
The machine or container that executes a pipeline job. Runners are a capacity pool with all the usual properties — queue depth, saturation, cost and cold start — and queue time is invisible in most build dashboards, which report only how long the job itself took. They are also the most credential-rich compute in an organisation, since they hold the keys to deploy.
Full entry →