And setting up your own runners is quick and super easy. You can have the administration thing and the build jobs run in their own docker containers, so you have no tough dependencies what distro to run on your CI machine. The only detail I find confusing is the terminology. The administration thing runs in a container called gitlab-runner. The build jobs run in something called runner executor IIRC. These are several containers per job, each with a machine generated name. Partly readable, but can still be confusing if you have lots of them and you need to debug something. On the other hand I assume you cannot debug in the cloud at all (have never tried) so the comparison is still "can be a bit painful" against "impossible" in favor of your own docker-based runners.