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@ Anthony Accioly
2025-03-28 16:48:38
Your first question is context-sensitive. For example, many OSS projects have multi-hour builds, especially when extensive E2E testing is required.
As for GitHub Actions' built-in runners, they are free (within reasonable usage limits) and work well for OSS projects. However, they can become expensive very quickly for private repositories. One of my recent adventures involved migrating GA runners to AWS, this reduced GitHub bills by a solid $20k per month, at a company that wasn't nearly as big as that number might suggest. Even with Amazon's outrageous pricing, the migration made the CI runs and ephemeral environments significantly cheaper.
A few things to keep in mind about GitHub Actions' standard runners though:
1. They will be slower than your own server.
2. There's no support for Windows on ARM yet, and macOS x86-64 requires using an outdated runner image.
3. Expect occasional unexplained outages. GitHub hasn’t been particularly reliable lately, and when issues arise on their end, there’s often little you can do but wait.
4. Be cautious archiving artifacts, they add up quickly.
Hopefully this is helpful.