actions-runner-controller VS azure-pipelines-agent

To set-up the self-hosted runner, an Action Runner Controller (ARC) and Runner scale sets application will be installed via helm. This post will be using Azure Kubernetes Service and ARC that is officialy maintained by Github. There is another ARC that is maintained by the community. You can follow the discussion where github adopted the ARC project into a full Github product here

Before this we were using https://github.com/actions/actions-runner-controller but that's running on K8s instead of VMs. So along with common limitations of running CI jos in K8s/container, it cannot have exactly the same environment as the official GitHub runners. Maintaining a K8s cluster was also very difficult.

ARC is great for running GitHub Actions on Kubernetes:

https://github.com/actions/actions-runner-controller

Almost all of our cicd, builds run on GitHub. I'm talking cypress tests, deployments via terraform and helm to over 25 environments, all backend tests, daily test runs etc. Overall we were racking up a cost of almost 20k on GitHub. With the ARC deployed and using spot instances I think our total infrastructure costs went up about 4-5k even though we added more actions. If we switched back to their runners we'd probably be around 25k at this point.

What else needs to be moved to my artifactory (charts - https://github.com/actions/actions-runner-controller/tree/master/charts ) - if so tar or entire folder or anything else ? ) What should the above steps correspond to?

You need to use the steps in the repo instead of the steps on the docs if you're using enterprise server.

Honestly not a fan of Github docs.....I feel like the ones in the repo are much clearer and easier to understand/read.

Its pretty easy to set up honestly. Deploy this on your k8s cluster https://github.com/actions/actions-runner-controller and a runnerDeployment and youre good to go.

Trying to use the Actions Runner Controller (https://github.com/actions/actions-runner-controller) to utilize self-hosted runners. I keep getting this error on the controller.

I'm convinced one of (or a combination) of things is happening here in regards to authentication. This GH enterprise account is configured with SAML. I feel like that is a valid data point. I'm using https://github.com/actions/actions-runner-controller as a reference guide for what I should be doing. I suspect whoever is Owner of this organization has modified what I can do as a user. The steps in the doc where I can actually Install the Application isn't available to me. When configuring the GitHub App I'm given two options. I select the option for "this account only" knowing the documentation says it is possible to use this Github App with a repo in the Organization as long as I have Admin privileges or I'm the owner.

> GitHub Actions is based on Visual Studio Team Foundation Server's CI, and later Azure DevOps

Yes and no, ADO Agent (https://github.com/microsoft/azure-pipelines-agent) is far more secretive and "black-box" alike.

Fun fact: Microsoft had a plan to provide that!

They canned it.

https://github.com/microsoft/azure-pipelines-agent/pull/2687...

You will need to download the agent (https://github.com/microsoft/azure-pipelines-agent/releases/latest ) and run the configure command.

A GitHub issue was opened to track support for different Node versions with custom tasks, but it remained unresolved for a long time. In October 2022 it was announced that Node.js 16 support was available.

Even thought im in the EU datacenter, my hosted agent is version 2.213.2, which is also the latest version of the agent taht was released by MS - https://github.com/microsoft/azure-pipelines-agent

{ "name": "AzurePipelines", "dockerFile": "Dockerfile", // Configure tool-specific properties. "customizations": { // Configure properties specific to VS Code. "vscode": { // Add the IDs of extensions you want installed when the container is created. "extensions": [ "ms-vscode.azurecli", "ms-vscode.powershell", "hashicorp.terraform", "esbenp.prettier-vscode", "tfsec.tfsec" ] } }, // Use 'forwardPorts' to make a list of ports inside the container available locally. // "forwardPorts": [], // Use 'postStartCommand' to run commands each time the container is successfully started.. "postStartCommand": "/home/vscode/azure-pipelines/start.sh", // Comment out to connect as root instead. More info: https://aka.ms/vscode-remote/containers/non-root. "remoteUser": "vscode", // Amend Azure Pipelines agent version and arch type with 'ARCH' and 'AGENT_VERSION'. https://github.com/microsoft/azure-pipelines-agent/releases. "build": { "args": { "UPGRADE_PACKAGES": "true", "ARCH": "x64", "AGENT_VERSION": "2.206.1" } }, "features": { "terraform": "latest", "azure-cli": "latest", "git-lfs": "latest", "github-cli": "latest", "powershell": "latest" } }

Looks like they are working on it:https://github.com/microsoft/azure-pipelines-agent/issues/3922

Thanks for sharing this. As mentioned in this GitHub issue, the build pipeline does render PS 7.2 new color escape sequences, however release pipeline does not.