<story><title>GitHub Actions: Ephemeral self-hosted runners and new webhooks for auto-scaling</title><url>https://github.blog/changelog/2021-09-20-github-actions-ephemeral-self-hosted-runners-new-webhooks-for-auto-scaling/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sascha_sl</author><text>This feature was delayed every month after May.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;I have been of the opinion that investing into GH Actions at this stage is purely sunken cost (at my org), and I&amp;#x27;m not moving until the team behind this thing ships something that doesn&amp;#x27;t break half the time. These have been seriously frustrating months, because no amount of working around this messy code[1] made of 5 layers of MS style .NET (seriously, deleting a directory goes 5 layers deep in the call stack) will ever produce a stable product. They don&amp;#x27;t even know their own code base that well, when they first attempted ephemeral runners with `--once` it turned out the thing they produced could never work (because the server-side scheduler loves pipelining jobs to machines and failing miserably when these disappear, job times out after 20 minute of waiting type)&lt;p&gt;[1]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;actions&amp;#x2F;runner&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;actions&amp;#x2F;runner&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>GitHub Actions: Ephemeral self-hosted runners and new webhooks for auto-scaling</title><url>https://github.blog/changelog/2021-09-20-github-actions-ephemeral-self-hosted-runners-new-webhooks-for-auto-scaling/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>e_proxus</author><text>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.&lt;p&gt;Currently hosting the runner on e.g. FreeBSD or custom embedded systems is not supported (or even possible).</text></comment>