Sometimes it's nice to do something, maybe a little indecisive, just because it's possible. That's the subject of this blog.

It is just two days ago when I asked on Twitter:

Has anyone deployed their self-hosted #GitHub Actions runners to #AWS #Fargate? – @nikovirtala

Apparently, no one did, since also Google didn't provide me any hits. 🤷

So, what was all this buzz about and what I actually wanted to achieve?

GitHub Actions is a software workflow automation tool with CI/CD capability from GitHub. In November 2019, GitHub open-sourced the runner component and added support to run workflows on self-hosted machines.

AWS Fargate, on the other hand, is a serverless compute engine for containers and one of the best computing inventions of this decade.

I want to use AWS Fargate to host my GitHub Actions runners!

Since both technologies are familiar to me, I decided to pull strings together. As an exception to my regular routines, I chose to use AWS Cloud Development Kit as a deployment tool instead of a safe and sound Terraform.

After a few hours of work, I came up with this: a fully functional example of executing self-hosted GitHub Actions runner on AWS Fargate! https://github.com/nikovirtala/github-actions-runner

It’s still raw, but most importantly, it proves the concept works! If you have any questions or comments, poke me on Twitter or GitHub, I'm all ears. :)

Ps. I right before finishing this post, I noticed that yesterday we also got support for Organization level self-hosted runners. It only means that my newly created side project just got a new feature too! 🤓