RunsOn

RunsOn is a solution for running self-hosted GitHub Actions runners entirely inside your AWS account. It launches ephemeral EC2-based runners for each job, aiming to reduce CI costs while keeping code, secrets, and logs within your VPC.

Key Features

• One-click deployment and upgrades via a CloudFormation template
• Ephemeral VM per job for clean, GitHub-hosted-runner-like execution
• Supports Linux and Windows runners, including x64, ARM64, and GPU instance types
• Spot instance support with automatic fallback to on-demand capacity
• Integrated GitHub Actions cache backend using an S3 bucket for fast, large, and persistent caching
• Scales to large job bursts with high concurrency, without Kubernetes
• Optional SSH access to runners with network restrictions and support for static IPs when using private networking
• Cost and alert reporting for runner usage

Use Cases

• Replace GitHub-hosted runners to reduce CI spend while keeping full workflow compatibility
• Run specialized workloads requiring ARM64, GPUs, or very large EC2 instance types
• Provide isolated, ephemeral build environments for organizations that require VPC-only execution

Limitations and Considerations

• Designed specifically for AWS (deployment and runner execution depend on AWS services)
• Some functionality is not fully open source: the main repo is MIT, but the server submodule is proprietary and requires a license for most commercial use

RunsOn fits teams that want AWS-native control over GitHub Actions runners, predictable scaling, and faster caching without operating Kubernetes-based runner controllers. It is particularly useful where data residency and network isolation are required.