Review GitHub Actions self hosted

[DBot]

Hey guys,
Our company was looking into GitHub Actions self hosted solutions to save on costs and to improve speed. One interesting project I came across was runs-on .

How is it different?

• It uses VMs instead of containers / pods which is used in GitHub actions self-hosted solutions from other vendors and GitHub Action Runner Controller (ARC)
• Uses webhooks instead of long-polls used in ARC. I've had multiple issues with jobs not picking up and very slow startup times with ARC.
• Subscription instead of a minute-based calculation. You pay an annual fee of 300 EUR instead of every minute billing (Free for OSS).

Cost savings is projected to be around 80- 94% based on the size of the runner (couldn't test as we went with an existing vendor solution).
Setup was pretty simple and took around 20 minutes.
It can add top 10 contributor's SSH keys in case you want to debug the job (can be set to on or off for the whole org)
Also supports S3 bucket caching to regional S3 buckets which eliminates the 10 GB limit on GitHub cache, faster cache / restore times and to save on network costs.

Caution: I'm not affiliated with the product. Please do your own research in case you want to use the product.

 

[ashayc]

Not sure if you've had any experience with actually using it yet, but how well does it scale with parallel commits and executions? Is there a new VM created for every single task/pipeline?

 

[DBot]

New VM is created for every new job. It’s the same way actions work. Instead of ephemeral containers in ARC, you get VMs here.
If you mean concurrency and stuff, it’ll have the same limitations as GitHub actions. Another limitation you’ll have is number of EC2 instances that can be run in your account. If it hits that limit, the job will be queued and picked up FIFO.

Not sure if you've had any experience with actually using it yet

Have not used it on production. Have tested it on a few repositories.