Migrate from Actions Runner Controller (ARC) to runnerhut

What Actions Runner Controller (ARC) does well

• No per-minute vendor fee — you pay only your cloud bill
• Complete control over networking, images and data residency
• Runs inside your existing Kubernetes footprint

Where we differ

• Someone has to own scaling, image builds, cache infrastructure and upgrades
• Cold starts and queue times are yours to tune
• Cache has to be built and operated separately — usually S3 plus a proxy
• The real cost is engineering time, which rarely appears in the comparison

The migration

jobs:
  build:
-   runs-on: self-hosted
+   runs-on: runnerhut-8vcpu-ubuntu-2404
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4

And the migration back

We publish this because after BuildJet's shutdown, "what if you disappear" is a fair question. Leaving is the same single line you changed to arrive.

jobs:
  build:
-   runs-on: runnerhut-8vcpu-ubuntu-2404
+   runs-on: ubuntu-latest

Checklist

1. Install the runnerhut GitHub App on the repositories you want to move
2. Change runs-on in one job first and compare timings against the old runner
3. Add runner.arch to cache keys if you are also moving to arm64
4. Roll out to the rest of the repository once the comparison looks right
5. Set a budget cap and concurrency cancellation before going organisation-wide