actions-runner-controller

because github stops passing out the jobs in general. The self hosted runners are behind the actions runner controller: https://github.com/actions/actions-runner-controller

I've been experimenting with their controller for k8s runners https://github.com/actions/actions-runner-controller. The awful thing about it is that you cannot run one set for all projects unless they're all under an organisation, so for normal accounts you need to provision one runner set per project.

If we already have some EKS clusters setup, is there a benefit to this over Actions Runner Controller (ARC)? https://github.com/actions/actions-runner-controller

Before this we were using https://github.com/actions/actions-runner-controller but that's running on K8s instead of VMs. So along with common limitations of running CI jos in K8s/container, it cannot have exactly the same environment as the official GitHub runners. Maintaining a K8s cluster was also very difficult.

The default kubernetes implementation owned by github[1] assumes ephemeral runners by default. You can also specify what policies they should have using regular network policies provided by kubernetes. So, if you have a kubernetes cluster, that's the way to go. [1]: https://github.com/actions/actions-runner-controller

ARC is great for running GitHub Actions on Kubernetes: https://github.com/actions/actions-runner-controller I think Kubernetes is a better platform than EC2 for runners, it's faster and more integrated with your tooling (if you're using Kubernetes).

There are also official Heml charts available for ARC: https://github.com/actions/actions-runner-controller I am in the process of setting it up on a cheap Hetzner box. If it works, would be a great deal! You can get a 64 GB RAM box for 35 EUR/mo at server auctions with unlimited traffic. I don't mention CPU or GPU, as typically this isn't a bottleneck for my projects. Plus, I can configure cache sharing via host-mounted dir. E.g. pnpm cache can be all in one place, and be locally available to pods via a mounted dir. Same for the Docker image cache. This would speed up CI runs and also reduce network traffic by a huge margin. GitHub Actions effectively has no local caching. There's an action for caching, but it uses a blob storage for cache artifacts. Which then gets network fetched, gzip'ed and gunzip'ed each time, and from my experience

Another pitfall I have encountered is the lack of a true ephemeral agent runner solution for running the actions runner agent in your own infrastructure. The way it works (the last time I checked) is when you register a worker as "ephemeral: true" it automatically deregisters itself from your runner pool and kills the agent process when a job is completed, but it is up to you to clean things up. This leads to somewhat hacky scripts to delete the compute instance after the agent process exits. There is also no officially supported kubernetes controller for creating ephemeral agents but the community created one [1] is often mistaken as an official github project. - [1] https://github.com/actions-runner-controller/actions-runner-...

The ARM nodes which are exactly the topic of this submission could be a place where you can self-host your GH runners :) https://github.com/actions-runner-controller/actions-runner-... works quite well with its autoscaling. You could create a zonal GKE cluster, which is in free tier, and create a small spot vm node pool with ARM nodes. It wouldn't be entirely free but it would cost quite low amount of money.

had the exact same thing with https://github.com/actions-runner-controller/actions-runner-... Seems to be up again now.

It's not official, but there are K8s / github actions runner deployments: https://github.com/actions-runner-controller/actions-runner-... I've been playing about with this and it seems to work quite well. Startup latency is quite high, and it's one pod-per-job (I think), but seems pretty flexible.

We use https://github.com/actions-runner-controller/actions-runner-... to auto scale on EKS. It also allows you to use a GitHub App for the runner registration instead of personal access tokens. Also it seems like the project is receives support from GitHub because they’re getting early access to test out features.

Yeah. I really hope they fix the dumb runner part: https://github.com/actions/runner/pull/660 I resorted to this one instead https://github.com/summerwind/actions-runner-controller but it requires kubernetes...

This is pretty cool. I just migrated from using Gitlab with k8s runners to Github Actions with k8s runners. I used the https://github.com/summerwind/actions-runner-controller operator to set up the runners.