[cyberax]

> And I mean sure, everything is kinda janky on Jenkins, but everything falls into an expectable corridor of jank you get used to.

Self-hosting Jenkins on an EC2 instance is probably going to result in a _better_ experience at this point. Github Cache is barely better than just downloading assets directly, and with Jenkins you can trivially use a local disk for caching.

Or if you're feeling fancy and want more isolation, host a local RustFS installation and use S3 caching in your favorite tools.

[Nextgrid]

Self-hosting on a host whose data actually persists is an even better experience, as it removes a lot of the tedium and workarounds such as extracting/down-/up-loading caches and so on. Get another host for redundancy and call it a day.

Hardware is getting cheaper and cheaper, but the fear-mongering around running a Linux machine has successfully prevented most businesses from reaping those cost reductions.

[cyberax]

Complete persistence has its downsides, as you can start getting "path dependency". E.g. a build succeeds only because some images were pre-cached by a previous build.

But having an _option_ to not download everything every time is great. You can add a periodic cache flushing, after all.

[wereHamster]

I repurposed old M1/M4 Mac Mini's at my workplace into GitHub action runners. Works like a charm, and made our workflows simpler and faster. Persisting the working directory between runs was a big performance boost.

[elashri]

> Hardware is getting cheaper and cheaper

Unfortunately not anymore and not in the foreseen future if we don't see some AI investment corrections.