What kind of ARM machine should I buy if I want to self-host an ARM server? My not-that-recent look at the market shows everyone kind of doing their own thing; Amazon makes Amazon's ARM servers, Apple makes Apple's ARM chips, etc. As some random guy who wants to test on ARM, it's annoying. Maybe things have improved recently, though?
(I'm guessing self-host realistically means "get a VM on AWS", which is probably fine for CI if you already use AWS. A little annoying to have another monthly bill to pay if you don't, though.)
The ARM nodes which are exactly the topic of this submission could be a place where you can self-host your GH runners :)
https://github.com/actions-runner-controller/actions-runner-... works quite well with its autoscaling. You could create a zonal GKE cluster, which is in free tier, and create a small spot vm node pool with ARM nodes. It wouldn't be entirely free but it would cost quite low amount of money.
Your best options IMO are either 1) a Mac Mini with 16GB of RAM running a Linux VM or Asahi Linux connected OR 2) an Nvidia Jetson Xavier AGX; you can get the 32GB version for like $700 USD I think. (The newer Orin is a fair bit more expensive.)
You realistically want something with ARMv8.2 or better, these are relatively easy to acquire with the current supply chains, they're beefy, can be equipped with fast storage, and they are both small units you can put on your desk. Note that the Xavier will require you to fiddle with the usual Nvidia bullshit through their SDK but it's otherwise a standard Ubuntu machine. It should be possible to get another distro on there too. The M1 will almost certainly perform better overall watt-for-watt though.
The point is to not have to self-host. It costs money, is a pain because maintenance is required, and there are security issues with running CI for public pull requests.
(I'm guessing self-host realistically means "get a VM on AWS", which is probably fine for CI if you already use AWS. A little annoying to have another monthly bill to pay if you don't, though.)