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.