Configuring Self-Hosted Runners with GitHub Actions

Introduction

In this post, co-authored with Veeraveni Ajay, I’ll provide an overview of configuring self-hosted runners with GitHub Actions. This is part of my exploration in software engineering, leveraging tools to streamline CI/CD processes and scale application deployments effectively.

Why Self-Hosted Runners?

We chose self-hosted runners to gain more control over our CI/CD environment, ensuring consistency with our production setup and improving cost efficiency for large-scale operations.

Tech Stack

To achieve this setup, we used:

  • Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service): To manage our Kubernetes environment.
  • GitHub Actions: For defining and running CI/CD workflows.
  • Docker: For containerizing our applications and runners.
  • Terraform: For infrastructure as code, enabling us to provision and manage cloud resources efficiently.

Streamlining CI/CD

By leveraging these tools, we were able to:

  • Improve Consistency: Ensure our CI/CD environment closely matched our production environment, reducing deployment issues.
  • Enhance Scalability: Easily scale our runner capacity by adding nodes to our Kubernetes cluster.
  • Increase Cost Efficiency: Reduce costs by using our own infrastructure instead of relying solely on GitHub-hosted runners.

Conclusion

Configuring self-hosted runners with GitHub Actions allowed us to streamline our CI/CD pipeline, making it more efficient and scalable. This setup is a testament to how we can use modern tools to optimize application deployments.

For a detailed step-by-step guide, check out our full blog post on Medium: Deploying Self-Hosted GitHub Actions Runners on EKS.


This post is part of my broader explorations in music, tech, and software engineering. Stay tuned for more insights and projects!

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