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Comment by btown | Hacker News Reader

Congrats on the launch! There do seem to be a number of other entrants in this space: https://github.com/neysofu/awesome-github-actions-runners#li...

What makes you stand out from the pack? The VM approach seems very cool - is this unique in the space? Do you have different approaches that provide speedups or security benefits not possible with other third party runner systems? Any benchmarks against competitors?

Separately, I'm curious about how you address VM startup speed. Do you boot VMs on demand, or do you have a pool of booted VMs awaiting jobs?

Anyways, it's exciting to see new approaches in the space! Wishing you and the team the best of luck!

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VMs are a necessity if you are serious about security and isolation guarantees. I'd hope everyone else also uses it.

I haven't run benchmarks but this comment provides a glimpse - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38571518

VM startup speed has many levels to it. Right now, we are doing the inefficient job of having a pool though we have some items in the roadmap to fix this better.

In terms of speed up, we are doing things differently. For instance, we are baking in container layer caching natively so that users can benefit. This leads to speed ups of 2-10x depending on how the dockerfile is structured for caching.

This is just the first step - we have a very exciting roadmap :-)

> VMs are a necessity if you are serious about security and isolation guarantees. I'd hope everyone else also uses it.

How do you ensure that the VMs are clean on every run? Do you boot up a fresh clean install?

How do you make sure your host machines are clean too? What’s the cadence for resetting those host machines up?

They are ephemeral VMs and are alive only for the duration of a single job. They are not reused.

We are essentially competing in the same space with https://dime.run/

We also use VMs. But they are persistent. So you always see your runners as Online in GitHub UI.

We achieve this by investing in virtualization technology so that idle runner VMs do not consume too many resources. Disclaimer: I used to work for Google Cloud.

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