alt Hacker NewsAm I reading this right, they are going to rack their own servers for this business?
If I were them I would be looking at renting from bargin bin hosting providers like hetzner or ovh to run this on. The great thing is that hetzner also has a large pool of racked servers that you can tap into.
You are basically going to re-implement hetzner at a smaller (and probably worse) scale by creating your own multitenant mini cloud for running these ci jobs.
Free advice: set up a giant kubernetes cluster on hetzner/ovh, use gvisor runtime for isolation, submit ci workloads as k8s jobs, give the k8s jobs different priority classes based on job urgency and/or some sort of credit system, jobs will naturally be executed/preempted based upon priority.
There you go, that is the product using nearly 100% existing and open source software.
Yeah, your goal is pretty nice if you want to open source blacksmith at their level, but I think most people would be pretty happy with just a hetzner vm using act https://github.com/nektos/act if they want github actions, or jenkins.
I think we can rent hetnzer vms on a per hour basis or maybe we can't , but I do know that there are services like (linode?) I guess, which use a per second model.
Combine that with I think automatic installation of act and you pay for per second use of your CI.
Plus points if we can use criu to scale from lower end machines to higher end machines depending upon the task while continuing the task from where it was left.