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Comment by mattbillenstein | Hacker News Reader

I'm using buildkite - which lets me run the workers myself. These are long-lived Ubuntu systems setup with the same code we use on dev and production running all the same software dependencies. Tests are fast and it works pretty nice.

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I'm not using it right now, but at a previous company we used Gitlab CI on the free tier with self-hosted runners. Kicked ass.

Self-hosted runners are brilliant, but have a poor security model for running containers or building them within a job. Whilst we're focusing on GitHub Actions at the moment, the same problems exist for GitLab CI, Drone, Bitbucket and Azure DevOps. We explain why in the FAQ (link in the post).

> poor security model for running containers or building them within a job

You mean Docker-in-Docker? If so, we used Kaniko to build images without Docker-in-Docker

There is a misconception that Kaniko means non-root, but in order to build a container it has to work with layers which requires root.

Using Kaniko also doesn't solve for:

How do you run containers within that build in order to test them? How do you run KinD/K3s within that build to validate the containers e2e?

The benefit of Kaniko (relative to Docker-in-Docker) is that you don't need to run in privileged mode.

We test our containers in our Dev environment after deploying

That is a benefit over DIND and socket sharing, however it doesn't allow for running containers or K8s itself within a job. Any tooling that depends on running "docker" (the CLI) will also break or need adapting.

This also comes to mind: "root in the container is root on the host" - https://suraj.io/post/root-in-container-root-on-host/

This reminds me of the erlang map-reduce "did you just tell me to fuck myself" meme

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