[loujaybee]

Yeah, that's fair. The blog was getting quite long, so we need to do some deeper dives in follow-ups.

Gitpod Flex is runner-based. The runner interface is intentionally generic so that we can support different clouds, on-prem or just Linux in future.

The first implemented runner is built around AWS primitives like EC2, EBS and ECS. But because of the more generic interface Gitpod now supports local / desktop environments on MacOS. And again, future OS support will come.

There’s a bit more information in the docs, but we will do some follow ups!

- https://www.gitpod.io/docs/flex/runners/aws/setup-aws-runner... - https://www.gitpod.io/docs/flex/gitpod-desktop

(I work at Gitpod)

[nickstinemates]

Echoing the parent you're replying to. You built up all of the context and missed they payoff.

[ethbr1]

I thought it was fair.

>> We’ll be posting a lot more about Gitpod Flex architecture in the coming weeks or months.

Cramming more detail into this post would have exceeded the average user read time ceiling.

[Bombthecat]

Still No idea what you did technically... Maybe a second post?

Did you use consul?

[gchamonlive]

that is exactly what a "follow-up" is

[ensignavenger]

Awesome, looking forward to hearing more. I only recently began testing out Theia and OpenVSCodeServer, I really appreciate Gitpod's contributions to open source!

[weikju]

What’s a “runner”?

[gchamonlive]

It's a compute resource you configure to offload compute jobs from a specific platform. You can have for instance Jenkins runners that will actually execute the pipelines and leave the main node free to do UI and admin tasks.

You also have github and gitlab VCS's that have their own hosted runners for pipelines, but also enable you to configure a runner to use private resources to offload jobs to.