alt Hacker NewsI am not understanding something.
If its the price of runs, then its not always running.
If its price of the agent to exist, then thats not paying per runs- then you’re right that people tend to leave their runners online 24/7- but I’ve never worked anywhere that had workers building 24/7.
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I guess some people just always have something running since it's owned hardware. Daily builds of popular OSS projects or constant vuln scans or whatever?
We're targeting 4x different deployment pipelines, so while we aren't running 24/7, we are running the same number of hours but split over all our runners. Often runs are queued during our busy 8-hour work-day, and then unused for 16-hours.
Either way, we will likely pay 8-hours4-pipelines5-days=160 hours per week, just shy of 168-hours for true 24/7. This currently costs $0 just for context.
OP means to say he has many jobs in the merge queue that the runners are always busy 24/7.
This is not uncommon in some orgs - less number of concurrent runners, slow builds, loads of jobs because of automation or how hooks for the runners are setup.
In the context of discussion that doesn't matter, OP's point distills to that they use minimum of 720 hours / month of orchestration time or some multiple of that on self hosted runners running 24x7.
Github will now charge $84 extra per month for single self-hosted runner running 24x7 - i.e. that is the cost for 43,200 build minutes for only their orchestration alone.
In a more typical setup that is equivalent to say 5 self-hosted running running ~4.5 hours a day(i.e 144/hours/runner/month)