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

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

#51

Post by root_axis »

encryptluks2 wrote: post #44
encryptluks2 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Thanks for pointing this out. I'm genuinely curious now what their Twitter profile is, but my guess is they'll delete the tweets or remove the Twitter account. Microsoft notoriously hires a lot of people from the Federal Sector who unfortunately appear to be mostly right-wing religious zealots.

Nm, found it: https://twitter.com/JoeB_in_NC First thing is a retweet from Ben Shapiro.

I disagree with their politics and think it's unprofessional to conduct business through a personal twitter account made up of partisan political retweets regardless of the politics, however I don't think it's necessary for you to repost this person's twitter account after they removed it from this thread, it will only lead to unnecessary harassment. I hope that you or the moderators remove it.

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

#52

Post by judge2020 »

19h wrote: post #45

The absolutely most annoying issue with GitHub Runners is the fact that they run 1 job .. at a time ... per server. You can only imagine our follow-up meetings about the fact that we had a fleet of 15 c5a.2xlarge instances and still half of the developers were waiting up to 20 minutes for an instance to go online. The worst part? The jobs don't clean up -- probably to allow for caching. We ran into into disk space is…

> The jobs don't clean up -- probably to allow for caching.

Ya, this helps with a specific build cache scenario I use, A workaround if you want it to cleanup is to put `rm -rf "${{ github.workspace }}"` at the end of your workflow.

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

#53

Post by xvilka »

The biggest problem with GitHub Actions that you can't restart just one job[1], it always restarts all jobs in the workflow. And this bug is not fixed for quite a while. Travis CI and Appveyor both allow that, of course.

[1] https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/432

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

#54

Post by slaughtr »

vyrotek wrote: post #50

We're pretty happy with Azure DevOps on our team. But, these competing offerings between Azure and GitHub have been really confusing to follow. Especially since folks are pointing out that GitHub Actions is partly Azure DevOps under the hood. It just seems like a complicated branding play because some people will refuse to use an Azure service but will gladly use a GitHub service still owned by Microsoft?

You don't need to create an Azure account to use Github Actions. It's not really refusing to use the service as much as using the streamlined one right in front of you.

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

#55

Post by jclulow »

IshKebab wrote: post #39
e_proxus wrote: post #16

I really wish the runner agent was written in something more portable than .NET. That choice feels like something purely political because they’re owned by Microsoft. I doubt and independent organization would have chosen it before other excellent choices such as Go, Rust etc. Currently hosting the runner on e.g. FreeBSD or custom embedded systems is not supported (or even possible).

It runs on Windows, Linux and Mac surely? How much more portable do you need?

There are other operating systems and CPU architectures. It's a boon for open source projects to be able to have CI on all the BSDs, and illumos, and Plan 9, and even weirder things.

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

#56

Post by xvilka »

sascha_sl wrote: post #17
e_proxus wrote: post #16

I really wish the runner agent was written in something more portable than .NET. That choice feels like something purely political because they’re owned by Microsoft. I doubt and independent organization would have chosen it before other excellent choices such as Go, Rust etc. Currently hosting the runner on e.g. FreeBSD or custom embedded systems is not supported (or even possible).

It's not because they're owned by Microsoft, at least not in the way you think. It's because GitHub Actions is rebranded Azure Pipelines. That a team at GitHub has been given a pile of Microsoft authored code is honestly much more concerning. They don't seem to understand it in its entirety either.

Then it's probably faster and easier to rewrite it in Go from scratch.

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

#57

Post by geofft »

root_axis wrote: post #51
encryptluks2 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nm, found it: https://twitter.com/JoeB_in_NC First thing is a retweet from Ben Shapiro.

I disagree with their politics and think it's unprofessional to conduct business through a personal twitter account made up of partisan political retweets regardless of the politics, however I don't think it's necessary for you to repost this person's twitter account after they removed it from this thread, it will only lead to unnecessary harassment. I hope that you or the moderators remove it.

It's the first Google result for 'joe bourne github twitter'. He's not trying to keep it a secret, and I don't know why we should keep it secret for him. Is he supposed to be embarrassed about it?

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

#58

Post by nicoburns »

19h wrote: post #45

The absolutely most annoying issue with GitHub Runners is the fact that they run 1 job .. at a time ... per server. You can only imagine our follow-up meetings about the fact that we had a fleet of 15 c5a.2xlarge instances and still half of the developers were waiting up to 20 minutes for an instance to go online. The worst part? The jobs don't clean up -- probably to allow for caching. We ran into into disk space is…

Can't you run more than one runner per server? My understanding was you start one up, give it a directory to work in, and it'll register itself with the central server and start processing jobs. I thought you could just run more instances if you wanted parallelism.

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

#59

Post by newman314 »

mrclean8586 wrote: post #31
sascha_sl wrote: post #12

This feature was delayed every month after May. And yet it is still half baked. We prepared for this with internally shared docs and the branch built in private for a while, but still had to roll back yesterday because the scheduler reverted to putting jobs wherever it pleased (including on ephemeral runners that already have a job) and randomly cancels large sets of jobs too. I have been of the opinion that investin…

Product manager on the GitHub Actions team reporting in, we're sorry to hear about this issue with the rollout of ephemeral runners. Our engineering team is aware of this issue and is heavily prioritizing the investigation and fix. We'd love to look into your specific case if you want shoot me an email: thejoebourneidentity@github.com

One issue that I've been dealing with over the last 48hrs is that pushing Docker images to GHCR has been randomly failing with 403 errors.

AFAIK, there has been no communication/acknowledgement of this as an issue. It makes it hard to decide to pick GHCR as a registry of choice.

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

#60

Post by silasb »

sascha_sl wrote: post #12

This feature was delayed every month after May. And yet it is still half baked. We prepared for this with internally shared docs and the branch built in private for a while, but still had to roll back yesterday because the scheduler reverted to putting jobs wherever it pleased (including on ephemeral runners that already have a job) and randomly cancels large sets of jobs too. I have been of the opinion that investin…

Has your team considered looking into buildkite? We love the flexibility it gives us. Being able to dynamically build pipelines is a very nice feature that not many others have (at least that I could tell when I was researching).
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