Hello! You're hearing from me because you signed up for updates on my work, or you bought an eBook from me. I hope that you're well.

I wanted to write to you and tell you very quickly about what we're building at OpenFaaS Ltd to help teams make the best use of their time and run CI securely. I've also got some background story that I think you'll find interesting and a free webinar recording on microVMs you won't want to miss.

How I got into microVMs and low level tech

As you may know, with faasd, mentioned in Serverless For Everyone Else, I started a new version of OpenFaaS that was ideal for running on a single host, with many of the advantages of functions, without the complexity and overheads of Kubernetes.

That involved working with very low-level technology, which was mostly undocumented, with lots of promise - but with dark paths to follow, covered in metaphorical thorns. Fast forward to today, and faasd is something we barely have to touch, it just works and is super lightweight due to the projects like containerd and CNI that it uses.

See also: Meet faasd. Look Ma’ No Kubernetes! - Alex Ellis, OpenFaaS Ltd: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnZJXI377ak

Back to GitHub Actions and microVMs

I was tempted to use Firecracker instead of containers for faasd, they are fast to launch, have a strict security boundary and are trusted by AWS to run potentially hostile workloads at scale for their customers.

The culmination of my learnings was in a new product and I introduced it in a short video clip as part of a webinar with Richard Case from Weaveworks. Richard had also seen the value and wanted to help others get started with it.

Watch the webinar to learn the differences between legacy VMs, containers and microVMs "A cracking time: Exploring Firecracker & MicroVMs" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYCsa5e2vqg

I also built up a microVM lab with Firecracker that you can try for free on your own Linux machine:

https://github.com/alexellis/firecracker-init-lab/

Unresolved problems with GitHub Actions

Hosted runners are incredibly convenient and I use them all the time. They are free for public repos, and for private repos you can pay per minute. What's not to love?

They're slow, limited on risk space, and regularly run into issues with Kubernetes due to the aforementioned
They have no support for Arm builds, customers have told us they are running into 35-45 build times, for something that takes 1m on their M1/M2 laptop
The self-hosted Kubernetes operator - Actions Runtime Controller (ARC) leaves a lot to be desired

Our first customer on actuated came to us out of frustration with ARC: it's is slow and insecure for anything that involves running, building a container, or testing E2E with KinD. If you don't use containers in your CI and aren't planning on soon - then there are other issues - ARC has to be run in an isolated K8s cluster, customising the image is hard, it's something you have to run yourself, and upgrade, and manage, and nobody is going to support you.

Actuated sets out to fix all these problems. It's the only way to run self-hosted GitHub Actions in microVMs, with full security isolation, bare-metal speed, and next to no management or maintenance.

Maybe this resonates with you?

You can find out more on the homepage and in these recent blog posts:

https://actuated.dev/

Announcement: Blazing fast CI with MicroVMs

How to make GitHub Actions 22x faster with bare-metal Arm

Is the GitHub Actions self-hosted runner safe for Open Source?

If you'd like to explore it for your team you can go ahead and sign up on a plan or book a call with me to discuss it further.

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