About

Many organizations using GitHub Actions want faster builds, lower spend, stronger security, and more control over where code, secrets, and artifacts are processed. RunsOn addresses this by running ephemeral GitHub Actions runners in the customer’s own AWS account, making CI/CD pipelines more cost-efficient, scalable, and compliant — without requiring a complex self-hosted runner platform to maintain.

RunsOn is made by Cyril Rohr, a developer turned infra lover from Rennes, France.

I’ve been making Dev/Ops related products since 2013. Some of my projects:

• PullPreview.com ↗ (2018) - Full-fidelity preview environments for GitHub pull requests.
• Packager.io ↗ (2013) - Linux DEB/RPM packaging for modern web applications.

How it came about

As part of my freelance jobs at various companies, I’ve implemented a lot of GitHub Actions workflows. I like GitHub Actions a lot, but:

• some longer workflows (>5min) would merit faster runners.
• running out of free minutes can get expensive pretty quick.
• a lot of interesting features (static IPs, arm runners, etc.) are sometimes only available with higher-tier plans.

None of the existing options checked every box — official runners were expensive and slow, third-party SaaS meant trusting someone else with my code and secrets, ARC required Kubernetes expertise, and hand-rolled self-hosted setups needed constant babysitting.

So I built RunsOn: ephemeral EC2 instances that spin up per-job, run in your own AWS account, and self-terminate when done. Simple enough to deploy in 10 minutes, scalable enough to handle thousands of jobs per hour.

The code

The code is partly open-source, and available on GitHub ↗. Full source code is available with a Sponsorship license.

Thanks

Thanks to the early adopters, and especially Alan ↗ for being the first sponsor of this project and helping me uncover and fix the initial scalability issues.

RunsOn is now used across hundreds of companies, big and small, and is powering builds for millions of GitHub Actions workflows per month.