Architecture
Ephemeral storage
Quick answer
Ephemeral storage is disk attached to a runner for the duration of a job and wiped when the job ends.
Ephemeral storage is disk attached to a runner for the duration of a job and wiped when the job ends.
Why it matters
Local NVMe ephemeral storage is dramatically faster than network-attached disk, which matters more than people expect for checkout, install and test workloads.
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.
Related
Control planeThe control plane is the part of a system that makes scheduling and configuration decisions, as distinct from the data plane that executes the work.Data planeThe data plane is the part of a system that executes the actual workload — in CI, the runners that check out code and run your steps.Runner poolA runner pool is a set of runner instances kept ready so queued jobs can start without waiting for a machine to boot.Standby diskA standby disk is a pre-warmed volume holding a prepared runner filesystem so a job can start without provisioning storage.