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Show HN: Open-source x64 and Arm GitHub runners

ubicloud.com

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Re: Show HN: Open-source x64 and Arm GitHub runners

#51

Post by pinkgolem »

Arelius wrote: post #44
rgbrgb wrote: post #9

Congrats on the launch. Looks interesting. Quick thoughts on the landing page: - Pricing looks awesome. - I'm not currently the target audience because everything I'm doing right now is open source with free GitHub actions. - I'm left wondering what the catch is / why it's cheaper and faster. - Visual nit: lacking horizontal padding from 990px to ~1200px, a common window size on my 14" MBP. > Ubicloud is an open sour…

> I'm left wondering what the catch is / why it's cheaper and faster. So, while this is the first time I've heard of ubicloud, I use gha extensively. Abd frankly, I think it's just because Github has a crazy markup on their actions compute over the raw compute. Taking a quick look, it appears that their base rate is like $0.008 per-minute!! That's a rate that wouldn't look crazy out of line with EC2's hourly rate. I'…

Iops on GitHub runners is also terrible slow, you easily get a 5x to 10x improvement

We did the same, and set up GitHub actions runners on hetzner

Halfed the integration test time and made them more reliable.

Re: Show HN: Open-source x64 and Arm GitHub runners

#53

Post by asveikau »

rgbrgb wrote: post #9

Congrats on the launch. Looks interesting. Quick thoughts on the landing page: - Pricing looks awesome. - I'm not currently the target audience because everything I'm doing right now is open source with free GitHub actions. - I'm left wondering what the catch is / why it's cheaper and faster. - Visual nit: lacking horizontal padding from 990px to ~1200px, a common window size on my 14" MBP. > Ubicloud is an open sour…

> I'm left wondering what the catch is / why it's cheaper and faster.

I don't think it's very expensive to run a build server.

Re: Show HN: Open-source x64 and Arm GitHub runners

#54

Post by mike_hearn »

joshstrange wrote: post #33
suryao wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We support GitHub MacOS 13 runners on M2 Pros at WarpBuild [1]. They're about 25% faster and 50% cheaper per minute compared to the equivalent GitHub hosted runners. [1] https://docs.warpbuild.com/runners#macos-m2-pro-on-arm64

Nice, I don't think you supported them last I looked. I'll be glad to get off GH's mac runners which are straight garbage, like it's embarrassing or it should be for them. The sheer audacity to charge 10x the linux runners and still be so slow... At 10x price they are 2x+ slower than the linux runners for doing the same thing (checking out repo, installing dependencies, running webpack).

I'm curious what you need macOS for if you're doing a JS project. Is it Electron?

Re: Show HN: Open-source x64 and Arm GitHub runners

#55

Post by password4321 »

pinkgolem wrote: post #51
Arelius wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm left wondering what the catch is / why it's cheaper and faster. So, while this is the first time I've heard of ubicloud, I use gha extensively. Abd frankly, I think it's just because Github has a crazy markup on their actions compute over the raw compute. Taking a quick look, it appears that their base rate is like $0.008 per-minute!! That's a rate that wouldn't look crazy out of line with EC2's hourly rate. I'…

Iops on GitHub runners is also terrible slow, you easily get a 5x to 10x improvement We did the same, and set up GitHub actions runners on hetzner Halfed the integration test time and made them more reliable.

I've heard CI/CD in general and GitHub Actions specifically is where old cloud hardware goes until it dies.

Re: Show HN: Open-source x64 and Arm GitHub runners

#57

Post by ploxiln »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #30
necubi wrote: post #16

We've been using Ubicloud builders for our Rust project [0] for several months, and it's worked very well. We've seen CI times go from 10-15 minutes to 6-7, and our bill has gone from $300/month to $30. One counter-intuitive thing we found is that it's slow to save and restore caches, but the machines have good CPU, so for us it's been faster to disable cache entirely and just redo everything on each build. [0] https…

> so for us it's been faster to disable cache entirely and just redo everything on each build. I wonder what the consequential "carbon footprint" of this is, but at scale for all companies/all jobs of similar nature

Also consider the carbon footprint of using caches! Apparently it takes longer, because it has to send/recv more data, compress and decompress, cause load on other systems ...

It's really kinda impossible to judge the carbon footprint for these kinds of things, and if it's justified. Consider the carbon footprint of all the dumb AI feature rolled out at Facebook, Google, etc. Consider the carbon footprint of everyone trying to use ChatGPT now. Do you know how much power GPUs are guzzling to give each little answer? It's really huge, compared to a traditional google search! Is it worth it? ... who can judge eh

Re: Show HN: Open-source x64 and Arm GitHub runners

#58

Post by maxloh »

k8svet wrote: post #50
fdr wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The GitHub image is 86GB and people want an action VM to start reasonably quickly, so a full copy for every run isn’t going to work so well. As a side note, isn’t it nuts that GHA operates on a principle of “installing the universe” (and apparently the universe is 86GB) and updating about every week, and it’s not total chaos? I was surprised, but it seems to work.

> As a side note, isn’t it nuts that GHA operates on a principle of “installing the universe” (and apparently the universe is 86GB) and updating about every week, and it’s not total chaos? I was surprised, but it seems to work. As someone who has authored a GitHub Action to delete like 85% of the hodge-podge stuff blasted all over in a default runner image to free up more space for a Nix store. It's "nuts" indeed.

Any GitHub link for your code?

Re: Show HN: Open-source x64 and Arm GitHub runners

#59

Post by joshstrange »

mike_hearn wrote: post #54
joshstrange wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice, I don't think you supported them last I looked. I'll be glad to get off GH's mac runners which are straight garbage, like it's embarrassing or it should be for them. The sheer audacity to charge 10x the linux runners and still be so slow... At 10x price they are 2x+ slower than the linux runners for doing the same thing (checking out repo, installing dependencies, running webpack).

I'm curious what you need macOS for if you're doing a JS project. Is it Electron?

Cross platform app development using JS (TS). Quasar is the framework I use. I build my Android apps on linux but need macOS to build the iOS apps.

Re: Show HN: Open-source x64 and Arm GitHub runners

#60

Post by slekker »

CSDude wrote: post #56
tkellogg wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

are you pushing PHI/PII through github actions?

Does not matter - pipeline needs to be trusted because it has access to sensitive resources for deployment tasks, can fake test results etc.

Even though it is a bit of a PITA to maintain self hosted runners, it is the reason we do it.
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