Ephemeral runners

[npalm]

Description

The current runners are short lived but not ephemeral. A runner can process multiple jobs till it got killed by the scale-down lambda. Ephemeral runners guarantee a clean environment for every job to improve security. Avoiding any shared state, or left overs between jobs.

How

GitHub have introduced the workflow_job to support scaling ephemeral runners. The runner agent is extended with the option --ephemeral which will terminate the agent after a run and de-register it.

• Enable via option ephemeral to runners [ephemeral] Add option ephemeral runners #1375
• Boot instances faster, e.g. via pre-build ami
• Have an optional pool available of runner
• Handle events that cannot processed due to limits or exceptions

Implementation

For tracking implementation a GitHub project is crated to track progress. All work will be first merged to the branch feature/ephemeral. Active development (also via PR) on ephemeral runnes can done via PR's to this branch.

[skyzyx]

‡ …for GitHub.com.

For GHES, workflow_job does not exist in v3.2, and neither does --ephemeral. The latter is supposed to be coming in v3.3. There has been no public announcement of workflow_job coming to GHES one way or the other.

See also #182.

[npalm]

@skyzyx thanks for the notice, we will keep the module backwards comptabile. But I planning only to support hte ephemeral runners together with the workflow_job event

[aidan-mundy]

@skyzyx @npalm Enterprise Server 3.3.0.rc1 dropped yesterday with support for ephemeral runners and workflow_job.

[ScottGuymer]

Implementing this is in progress. Closing this in favour of #1372. Will track the implementation of this there.

[aidan-mundy]

@ScottGuymer 🤔 this is #1372

[ScottGuymer]

oops too many tabs..

[ScottGuymer]

This is now implemented and released