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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

#61

Post by CardiBFanatic23 »

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.

Most of the people who worked on Azure Pipelines got transferred to GitHub to work on Actions. You can even see the same names of developers contributing code to both the GitHub runner and the Azure DevOps agent.

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

#62

Post by thomasmcfarlane »

newman314 wrote: post #59
mrclean8586 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We recently faced this; if you are using the docker/login action I'd give that a check as it turned out it was logging us out by default at the end of each job; resulting in some race conditions when running multiple runners on the same machine (sharing the same docker daemon).

Simple fix was to add `logout: false` to the action options.

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

#63

Post by sascha_sl »

silasb wrote: post #60
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).

We would like to run other things (probably concourse or argo), but this decision was made way further up to justify picking GitHub as provider. There might also be a Microsoft volume discount involved.

If we hard reject actions, we’ll probably end up with the prior status quo: Jenkins.

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

#64

Post by 147 »

danpalmer wrote: post #43
rubicks wrote: post #33

Too little and too late. Meanwhile, I'm over here with gitlab self-hosted runners that "dispatch" ephemeral runners. I can tweak scaling limits and the whole contraption runs seamlessly on the AWS ec2 instances of my choosing. My company just competed the migration from github to gitlab and, while it's not perfect, there's a lot to like on gitlab.

I think it's all just a matter of team preferences and for many this is less "too little too late" and more "yet another great release" when compared to the other tools they're using. I personally find Actions to be a far better product than GitLab CI and we're moving all our CI from a mix of Circle/Jenkins to Actions.

What do you like about Actions more than GitLab CI? Github Actions just feels much less mature and I keep running into issues.

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

#65

Post by newman314 »

molszanski wrote: post #18
wcdolphin wrote: post #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.

At https://packhelp.com we use Github Actions for ~50 devs. I can share my experience, reach me. Also, we have some useful Ansible scripts that I might share if there is interest

I would be interested in seeing the Ansible scripts if you are amenable to it. Thanks!

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

#66

Post by WorldMaker »

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?

Azure DevOps Pipelines is "stable"/"mature" and not seeing anywhere near as much active investment: most of the team supposedly moved directly over to Github Actions and that seems to be where all the new investment work is going.

Azure Codespaces was rebranded at the 11th hour before launch to Github Codespaces and moved almost entirely to the Github org and Azure DevOps was never given access unlike original announced plans under the Azure brand.

Rumors have been swirling for a while now (including when bharry, the VP whose kingdom was Azure DevOps, retired three years ago) that Azure DevOps is on the slow decline to some sort of chopping block and Microsoft will replace it entirely with Github eventually. There are rumors that even "deeply private" teams you wouldn't expect to move from Azure DevOps to Github internally at Microsoft have already migrated. (Certainly a lot of well known Windows Developers have much more active "Activity Indicators" on Github these days and it isn't necessarily entirely accountable by all the known public repos like Calculator, Terminal, etc and public facing samples projects nor that all of their documentation repos have obviously moved to Github.)

It would be wonderful to get an actual definitive and official statement from Microsoft, even if "eventually" when a migration will happen is still "years away" (which is presumably why they are afraid to give a statement yet, if it's still too far down the roadmap). That would make it easier today for some of us to start making cases to our teams that migrating voluntarily today to Github would be good for us. (Make the debate more than just "I want Codespaces" or "I want Github's dependency scanners" but also "Microsoft suggests it".)

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

#67

Post by subsection1h »

hnarn wrote: post #48
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.

Yikes. This is the strangest thing I've seen on HN in a long time. How can someone responsible for product at Github (!) think posting your private twitter account in a context like this is acceptable, and even more so when it's filled with this garbage.

Joe Borne works at GitHub only because it was acquired by Microsoft. He's been in the industry for more than a decade but his GitHub account was created only in 2016, and this is his sole public repo:

https://github.com/thejoebourneidentity/vm-stats

I know multiple people who left GitHub after it was acquired by Microsoft because of unsatisfying experiences they previously had with Microsofties. It seems that they made the right call.

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

#68

Post by abszeph »

molszanski wrote: post #18
wcdolphin wrote: post #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.

At https://packhelp.com we use Github Actions for ~50 devs. I can share my experience, reach me. Also, we have some useful Ansible scripts that I might share if there is interest

I’d also love to chat more. DM coming your way!

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

#69

Post by danpalmer »

147 wrote: post #64
danpalmer wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's all just a matter of team preferences and for many this is less "too little too late" and more "yet another great release" when compared to the other tools they're using. I personally find Actions to be a far better product than GitLab CI and we're moving all our CI from a mix of Circle/Jenkins to Actions.

What do you like about Actions more than GitLab CI? Github Actions just feels much less mature and I keep running into issues.

It's funny because that's pretty much my experience with GitLab CI. Actions is certainly a younger product, I do feel that, but in terms of the design, how the pieces fit together, and what it feels like to develop for it, it all feels much more mature than GitLab CI to me. GitLab always felt like a Travis clone that was hacked to look more like CircleCI.

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

#70

Post by molszanski »

newman314 wrote: post #65
molszanski wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At https://packhelp.com we use Github Actions for ~50 devs. I can share my experience, reach me. Also, we have some useful Ansible scripts that I might share if there is interest

I would be interested in seeing the Ansible scripts if you are amenable to it. Thanks!

Ok, will talk to the person who can release them. Shoot me an email in a week
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