For hosted runners that might be true. The best experience I’ve had with GHA self hosted runners was simply using a beefy VPS. At my current job, the self hosted runners were hosted on K8s using Arc and it was a… very unpleasant experience. We switched back to GH runners (turns out the free minutes + a few bucks a month is enough for our use case), but if we need to go back to self hosted I’ll advocate for a VPS.

> programming in YAML is still bad, composability is still an afterthought, etc.

I disagree on that. GitHub actions are as composable as it gets thanks to the ecosystem of actions. GHA is better than GitLab CI in this regard, and probably the best system I’ve used so far. It IS a bit clunky but overall I’ve been pretty satisfied with it.

I also disagree regarding YAML because you don’t program a CI, it’s mostly declarative work. The only conditions needed are a bit clunky to setup, I give you that, but it encourages to either keep the CI simple (no CI needs overly complex conditions), or move the logic to CI scripts in any scripting language.

Thought I'd plug my product because of the mention of actions-runner-controller on k8s. I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy :)

It is a terrible experience riddled with many gotchas. I'm making WarpBuild to provide runners (cloud and BYOC on user's aws account) to provide more powerful, faster, and overall much better experience. Try us out - you're guaranteed to save both money and time.

Interesting, bookmarking for later :)

it has to be reusable to be composable, ie. it needs some genericness, customization, etc. that usually requires logic, passing args, env vars, etc.

yes, writing programs (ie. an action) is the correct level of abstraction, but in general it just doesn't make much sense to have separate steps. (because for many cases unit testing and building artifacts can/should be done at the same time ... for example python/rust ... inside a container, download deps, build, then run tests, copy result to new layer, push)

> self-hosting GHA Runners (plural!) is ... hard (not impossible, and quite doable with enough investment, especially if one takes the dive into the murky waters of k8s)

I’m the maintainer of RunsOn (https://github.com/runs-on/runs-on), which solves this problem with far less investment