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GitHub Actions: Ephemeral self-hosted runners and new webhooks for auto-scaling

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1–10 of 74 posts

Re: GitHub Actions: Ephemeral self-hosted runners and new webhooks for auto-scaling

#3
Ephemeral runner support has been highly anticipated for our organization - I'm excited to see it go live!

However, GitHub Enterprise admins may want to take caution - some users have reported that the changes are not currently compatible https://github.com/actions/runner/pull/660

Re: GitHub Actions: Ephemeral self-hosted runners and new webhooks for auto-scaling

#4
post #3

Ephemeral runner support has been highly anticipated for our organization - I'm excited to see it go live! However, GitHub Enterprise admins may want to take caution - some users have reported that the changes are not currently compatible https://github.com/actions/runner/pull/660

FWIW my team jumped the gun and encountered that issue on our GHE instance as well (v3.1).

Re: GitHub Actions: Ephemeral self-hosted runners and new webhooks for auto-scaling

#5
post #3

Ephemeral runner support has been highly anticipated for our organization - I'm excited to see it go live! However, GitHub Enterprise admins may want to take caution - some users have reported that the changes are not currently compatible https://github.com/actions/runner/pull/660

Github Enterprise is a license / plan on github.com - I suspect you're talking about people running the Github Enterprise self-hosted VM?

Re: GitHub Actions: Ephemeral self-hosted runners and new webhooks for auto-scaling

#6
If anyone has experience using self hosted GH Actions at scale, I’d love to buy you a virtual coffee and hear about pros/cons for a parallelized CI flow currently running in Circle. Main motivation for switching would be simplification of tooling and increasing performance with better cache reuse and running within AWS for faster network access to ECR.

Re: GitHub Actions: Ephemeral self-hosted runners and new webhooks for auto-scaling

#7

If anyone has experience using self hosted GH Actions at scale, I’d love to buy you a virtual coffee and hear about pros/cons for a parallelized CI flow currently running in Circle. Main motivation for switching would be simplification of tooling and increasing performance with better cache reuse and running within AWS for faster network access to ECR.

Reach out to me and I’ll be happy to talk to you about my experiences with GitHub actions.

Re: GitHub Actions: Ephemeral self-hosted runners and new webhooks for auto-scaling

#8
So this is a big step forward in terms of avoiding the race condition where CI runners would accept new jobs during scale-in operations. But how do you ensure you only spawn new ephemeral runners as jobs become available? The webhook provides part of the answer, but do we need to use something like redis to ensure exactly one runner per queued job is started?

Re: GitHub Actions: Ephemeral self-hosted runners and new webhooks for auto-scaling

#9
post #5
post #3

Ephemeral runner support has been highly anticipated for our organization - I'm excited to see it go live! However, GitHub Enterprise admins may want to take caution - some users have reported that the changes are not currently compatible https://github.com/actions/runner/pull/660

Github Enterprise is a license / plan on github.com - I suspect you're talking about people running the Github Enterprise self-hosted VM?

Yeah, that's correct.

Re: GitHub Actions: Ephemeral self-hosted runners and new webhooks for auto-scaling

#10
post #2

The (previous) lack of ephemeral runners was one of my few gripes with GitHub Actions, great to see it's been released!

My main grip with Github is that it's pushing more tie in features to own the development experience even further. Github started as a community development hub, now trying to swallow us all, owning each bit of the development process to then own the market.

I don't have any affection for aws or gcp either, their attempt to dominate as de facto infrastructure and software provider is scary.

We don't need github actions. Spinning up machines that run cook books that can do anything, even at scale is ultimately more flexible and platform agnostic. If that's time consuming to make it work at scale, providers dedicated to that are out there.

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