The Digital Ocean runner executes a build pipeline on a dedicated droplet using the SSH protocol. The droplet is created for each pipeline execution and terminated upon completion.

When to Use?

The Digital Ocean runner is recommended for pipelines that require privileged access to a full virtual machine, and are unsuitable for execution inside containers. The Digital Ocean runner executes pipelines in dedicated, ephemeral virtual machines, and provides secure isolation for un-trusted workloads.

tldr; if your pipeline is unsafe to run inside a container, you may want to consider the Digital Ocean runner.