Platform engineering is the discipline of designing and building toolchains and workflows that enable self-service capabilities for software engineering organizations in the cloud-native era.

Platform Engineering

<@U04TA051F6F> this is great. I was exploring something like this a couple of months ago. we eventually went with launching a new ec2 instance but any reason you explored autoscaling rather than launching new ec2 instance each time?

the main benefits we saw was that we could customise different ec2 instance for each type of repository

oh ok got it, my bad, I thought you were using AWS ASG, just the system is autoscaling

<@U04SG5UGD0R> sorry for the late response, the real problem here was event driven dynamic auto-scaling for our github runners. The event triggers we needed are for multiple repositories (not one). Let me know if you are interested in this, happy to connect and tlak through this.

This is something that’s potentially on our roadmap as well. Have you considered using AWS Fargate? Seems like it could be a good match cost-wise. Although I’m not sure what kind of performance penalties you would get given Fargate startup times.

Hey <@U04QUCE07EU> - I did explore fargate as an alternative. But the harder problem was not around provisioning a machine. It was more about dynamic selection of machine types based on the load, and getting them up quick. Launchtemplates did the trick in a secure fashion. And was a thin wrapper on top of AWS EC2 - which seems like a simpler solution when compared to the other projects like Philips.

I am happy to walk you through our setup, we will be open sourcing this soon.