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Show HN: 10x cheaper GitHub Actions on your AWS account (warpbuild.com)

30 points by suryao ↗ HN
I'm Surya and I'm super excited to announce WarpBuild's new capabilities.

WarpBuild provides drop-in replacements for Github hosted runners that are faster and cheaper.

WarpBuild got its first customers from our launch on HN last year and I'm excited to show our newest offering: WarpBuild managed Github actions runners on your AWS account that are up to 90% cheaper than Github-hosted runners.

In the last couple of months, we released a ton of new capabilities to speed up your workflows and save on costs like: (1) BYOC: run Github actions in your AWS account, in ~5 mins. (2) Managed unlimited Github caches. (3) Static IPs for allowlisting. (4) Flexible runner and disk configurations. (5) Spot instances, arm64 and x86-64 runners.

This has been a top ask from our users, and this is even cheaper than self-hosting on k8s using `actions-runner-controller`, while significantly improving job queuing times. We are rather unique in the breadth and depth of the product we offer.

This is another capability that we think moves the ecosystem forward, including `action-debugger` via ssh, fast MacOS (M2 Pro) runners, CI analytics dashboards and more.

We are making CI faster and cheaper for everyone. What are your biggest pain points with CI, and more broadly the release process? I'd love to learn more.

12 comments

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clintonb
Congrats on the release! Any plans for GCP support?
suryao
Yes, but likely in ~1.5 months.
yrashk
I've been a user since the early days and loved the immediacy of responses to all our issues. Issues were fixed nearly instantaneously. It's very impressive.

Yet to explore the new capabilities!

suryao
Thanks for being patient with us through our teething issues. I think you'll like the stuff in our pipeline :-)
xamfy
Congratulations to the WarpBuild team on this exciting launch! I'm thrilled to see the new capabilities and can't wait to try them out.
mentioum
Surya and the team at Warp build are so customer focused - it's great!
bilalq
Are the MacOS runners cheaper than Github? Unless things changed, I seem to remember that you get billed for a minimum of a 24 hour period per instance even if you only have a MacOS instance active for 30 minutes.
suryao
The MacOS runners are in our cloud (not user's AWS) and are usage based. Users pay only for the actual minutes of usage.
hopeless
I'd love to see some more detailed write-up on how to switch to Warpbuild for different tech stacks. I tried a few months ago when the instructions were basically just to change the runs-on type but IIRC it failed with an error around setting up ruby (and caching it?) and there were no clear instructions on how to proceed.
suryao
Any such error is a bug. We do have tons of ruby users running 1000s of jobs each hour but maybe we are hitting a corner case with you, I'm sorry that that happened and I'll look into it.

Switching from github actions default runners is exactly a one line change.

Migrating from `actions-runner-controller` with k8s or self-managed VMs could be different based on specific customizations in place. However, we have import flows for the former to directly import the custom containers used in k8s, and an AMI import is coming soon.

There shouldn't be any stack specific behavior, except with caches. We have introduced fast custom caching actions including stack specific instructions in docs [1].

[1] https://docs.warpbuild.com/cache/quickstart#ruby

hth.

hopeless
ah, I think it was prior to the caching actions so I'll see if I can try again today. Thanks
dineshkumar_cs
Congrats on the release. Running actions on AWS is nice. It's complex to deal with tools in the AWS ecosystem.