Bake slow tooling into the image
Custom AMIs for BYOC runners
Supply your own AMI when a toolchain is too slow to install per job and too large to cache.
Most slow installs are better solved with caching or snapshots. A custom AMI is the right answer when the tooling is genuinely large, rarely changes, and cannot be cached — proprietary compilers, licensed SDKs, large simulator sets.
Requirements
- Built from a supported base — Ubuntu 22.04 or 24.04
- The runner agent is installed at boot, not baked in
- cloud-init enabled, since placement config is passed at launch
Your next build could be twice as fast, at half the price
Start free. Migrating away is the same one line, and we publish that diff too.