[jillesvangurp]

For the last two years, I've been running github actions like this:

- start a paused vm in google cloud

- run the build there (via a gcloud ssh command) and capture the output

- pause the vm after it is done

Takes about 4-5 minutes. Maybe a few dozen times per month. It's a nice fast machine with lots of CPU and memory. Would cost a small fortune to run 24x7. It would cost more than it costs to run our entire production environment. But a few hours of build time per month barely moves the needle.

Our build and tests max out those CPUs. We only pay for the minutes it is running. Without that it would takw 2-3 times as long. And it would sometimes fail because some of our async tests time out if they take too long.

It's not the most elegant thing I've ever done but it works and hasn't failed me in the two years I've been using this setup.

But it's also a bit artificial because bare metal is cheaper and it runs 24x7. The real underlying issue is the vastly inflated price of virtual machines cloud providers rent out vs. the cost of the hardware that powers them. The physical servers pay themselves back within weeks of coming online. Everything after is pure profit.

[latchkey]

We are building something like this for AMD MI300x GPU CI workloads. Except that every time someone shuts down a VM, we start a fresh one; hot spares cuts down your start up time.

We take on the small fortune expense and multi tenancy does the rest. The plan is to offer this as inexpensive as possible (far cheaper that deploying and running this type of compute yourself), so that it is a no brainer to take advantage of.

[Imustaskforhelp]

very interesting idea!

How much cheap is this as compared to github actions?

also why are you using gcloud? would certain other competitors like aws/(hetzner? if we are talking about vps) also suit the case.

I would love it if you could write a blog post about it.

[jillesvangurp]

We don't really pay for gh actions; we're staying below the freemium limit.

We use gcloud for convenience. Our production environment is there. So spinning up a vm is easy. Our builds also deploy there so we need gcloud credentials in our gh actions anyway. It only runs for a few hours per month in total. So the cost isn't very high. A few dollar at most.

No time for blog posts but feel free to adapt my gh action: https://gist.github.com/jillesvangurp/cccf5f9d61f4b457a994dc...

It basically runs a script on the vm. Should be fairly easy to adapt. There's a bit of bash in there that waits for the machine to come up before it does the ssh command that runs the build script.