While GitHub Actions runners cover a wide range of the most common run times and are quickest to start with, teams sometimes need to manage self-hosted runners, such as when organizational policy only allows deployments to a privately hosted infrastructure from within the organization's own security perimeter. In such cases, teams can use Philips's self-hosted GitHub runner, a Terraform module that spins up custom runners on AWS EC2 spot instances. The module also creates a set of Lambdas that handles lifecycle management (scaling up and down) for these runners. In our experience, this tool greatly simplifies the provisioning and management of self-hosted GitHub Actions runners. An alternative for teams that use Kubernetes is actions-runner-controller.
While GitHub Actions runners cover a wide range of the most common runtimes, sometimes you need something that is more specific to your particular use case, such as a less common language runtime or a particular hardware configuration. That's when you need a self-hosted runner. Philips's self-hosted GitHub runner is a Terraform module that lets you spin up custom runners on AWS EC2 spot instances. The module also creates a set of Lambdas to make up for the fact that you lose some of GitHub Actions' lifecycle management when you self-host runners. They do the heavy lifting for scaling runners up and down as needed. That helps manage costs and allows you to make runners ephemeral, which helps improve repeatability and security. When you do need to self-host runners, you might miss a lot of things when building custom runners from scratch. Look for tools like this one instead.
