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.

Once installed, you must log in to Sprinters with your GitHub account and provide credentials to your AWS account so that Sprinters will be able to launch instances there on your behalf.

Finally, all that’s left to do is edit a GitHub Actions workflow yaml file in a repository in your GitHub account and change a job definition’s runs-on: directive from

runs: ubuntu-latest

to

runs: sprinters:aws/ubuntu-latest

And Sprinters is now ready to kick into action.

The entire flow looks like this:

When a run of that workflow job is triggered, it won’t be run by GitHub 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 then 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 discarded, and you stop paying for it.

And that’s it! You’re now ready to get started!