Thread by @alexellisuk

GitHub Actions Managed/Hosted runners are great most of the time and super convenient

but also:

- limited on CPU/RAM
- slower than your own hardware or cloud provider
- limited to Intel runners
- limited on concurrent jobs
- and those e2e tests are making you miserable

So..

You think self-hosted runners might be the solution? You add a VM and

It takes you a day to install all the packages
You get conflicts between dirty state from prior builds
You schedule too few or too many builds and crash the server

You've created a "pet" server 😣

Someone says "we're using actions-runner-controller" on K8s, but what about "docker build"?

You can't build containers securely with Docker since it needs DIND / Privileged containers
You can't run a full KinD/K3s cluster in a job

You know it's wrong, but you do it anyway 🙈

Enter actuated 🤘

1) You set up a number of hosts with a bare OS and our agent binary
2) We run the control plane and start one-shot microVMs for every job
3) We managed the base VM image with all its tools
4) We schedule efficiently not to waste money or to exceed resources

So if you want to:

Get self-hosted benefits, whilst running Docker / K8s securely, without worrying about resource allocation, sign up for the pilot.

We'd love to hear from you:

github.com/self-actuated/…

Watch a live demo here with fresh VMs booting for every step of a matrix build, and K8s running with VM-level isolation.