Love the observability you’ve built into it. But push a little bit further the scale and you’ll probably hit limits with the persistent self hosted runner approach, and end up with something like runs-on (runs-on.com)
> You know how I know GitHub’s runners are bad? Because there’s an entire cottage industry of companies whose sole product is “GitHub Actions, but the runners don’t suck.” Namespace, Blacksmith, Actuated, Runs-on, BuildJet
He's not wrong. Buildjet just announced they were shutting down though, citing recent improvements to the GitHub Actions platform.
For the record I maintain the Runs-on [1] he's talking about, as a solo developer.
Thanks for posting this :) runs-on.com domain posts never get traction, wonder if this could be due to YCombinator investment in 5+ startups in that space... Oh well.
I am developing a self-hosted solution for this [1]. It’s true that it’s somewhat of a pain but JIT runners allow a lot of flexibility that we don’t find elsewhere.
Probably long overdue, but per-minute price vs per-job is quite expensive. Wouldn’t like to be in the shoes of “only” 2x cheaper third parties. If they follow up with faster runners… interested to see if they ever come up with a good SDK for their scale set API, will integrate it in RunsOn!
At this point this is considered a baseline feature of every good GitHub Actions third-party provider, but nice to see the write-up and solution they came up with!
Note that GitHub Actions Cache v2 is actually very good in terms of download/upload speed right now, when running from GitHub managed runners. The low speed Blacksmith was seeing before is just due to their slow (Hetzner?) network.
FYI you can also use a local S3 bucket as cache backend, and get 5x faster bandwidth and unlimited storage compared to a runner managed by GitHub: https://github.com/runs-on/cache
I guess TL;DR just use ephemeral runners when self hosting? There are lots of solutions for that. Also would be nice for GitHub to do something on the security front (allowlist / blocklists if IPs, hosted, etc or at least just reporting on traffic)
It doesn't provide the on-demand price, nor the instance specs. Also requires authentication. With this API I can also ask for pricing across a whole family type (e.g. `c7a`).