Can gitlab runners pause and restart gitlab?

Title is long story short.

Long story is: we have a GitLab instance running on AWS. We want to take use AWS snapshots to back up our data, but we need to make sure there are no file writes going on while the snapshot is taken. The best way we can think to do this is to pause the GitLab instance, take the snapshot, and then restart it. To automate this we are thinking about using a GitLab job. So the runner would have to pause gitlab during the scheduled time, and then restart the gitlab instance after. Is this possible?

Thanks!

Never tested such thing, but I think that the runner could have issues when you stop the GL instance because it won’t be able to reach it anymore. Can’t you just have a separate VM or some other system which has a cronjob that talks with the AWS API? It seems much stable approach…

Also - isn’t it possible that AWS already provides such functionality (cron-based tasks). They seem large enough to have such features requested by their customers - seems like a pretty basic thing to implement :thonk:

Heya,

AS there is no option to pause/resume a runner via CLI you can do so via API however you would have to consider setting up a cronjob to achieve what you want. The question is if you’re gonna experience issues by pausing a runner for a longer time.