Introduction

Sprinters runs your GitHub Actions jobs faster on your own AWS account at a fraction of the cost.

How does Sprinters work?

Sprinters is a GitHub App that you add to your GitHub user or organization account.

After you establish trust between Sprinters and your AWS account, Sprinters will be able to launch GitHub Actions Runner instances there on your behalf.

You can tell it to do so by editing your GitHub Actions workflow yaml file and changing a job definition’s runs-on: label from

runs-on: ubuntu-latest

to (where 123456789012 is your AWS account ID)

runs-on: sprinters:aws/123456789012:ubuntu-latest

Sprinters will then be ready to kick into action.

The entire flow looks like this:

When a run of that GitHub Actions workflow job is triggered, it won’t be run on expensive GitHub-hosted runners anymore. Instead, GitHub Actions notifies Sprinters, which immediately launches an instance in your AWS account. This instance is fully ephemeral and automatically starts up a fresh GitHub Self-Hosted Runner which registers itself with GitHub Actions.

GitHub Actions then executes your job on your brand-new AWS instance. The job execution logs will appear in GitHub Actions as usual, but each vCPU minute will only cost you a fraction of what GitHub would have charged you. Once the job completes, the instance terminates, all its associated volumes are destroyed, and you stop paying for it.

And that’s it!