alt Hacker Newsvery interesting idea!
How much cheap is this as compared to github actions?
also why are you using gcloud? would certain other competitors like aws/(hetzner? if we are talking about vps) also suit the case.
I would love it if you could write a blog post about it.
We don't really pay for gh actions; we're staying below the freemium limit.
We use gcloud for convenience. Our production environment is there. So spinning up a vm is easy. Our builds also deploy there so we need gcloud credentials in our gh actions anyway. It only runs for a few hours per month in total. So the cost isn't very high. A few dollar at most.
No time for blog posts but feel free to adapt my gh action: https://gist.github.com/jillesvangurp/cccf5f9d61f4b457a994dc...
It basically runs a script on the vm. Should be fairly easy to adapt. There's a bit of bash in there that waits for the machine to come up before it does the ssh command that runs the build script.