When we were developing VM images for GitHub Actions for actuated, we often needed to get a shell to explore and debug jobs. That functionality was also added for customers who used it to debug tricky jobs. I'm making it available for free for my GitHub Sponsors. Use-cases You need some apt packages, but don't know which ones. You go through a red/green or (red/red/red/red/red/green) cycle and it takes a long time Something's going wrong - you don't know what? Out of disk? Out of RAM? CPU overloaded? There's no quick way to find out, let's open an SSH session and run htop, iostat and df -h i ..read more

Here's my workflow for setting up the Raspberry Pi 5 to boot from NVMe for headless use. I'll also give my thoughts on the initial generation of PCIe breakout boards and some experiences trying to get the Google Coral Edge TPU ML accelerator to work. A quick note on first-generation NVMe breakout boards I found the first-generation of NVMe boards fiddly to connect, and quite often during setup the cable would partially dislodge, but not enough that it was obvious. The result was that the SD card would boot instead, or the NVMe wouldn't show up on lsblk. I'm not sure if there's a better approa ..read more

The time-sharing computers of the 1970s meant operators could submit a job and get the results at some point in the future. Under the guise of "serverless", everything old is new again. AWS Lambda reinvented the idea of submitting work to a supercomputer only to receive the results later on, asynchronously. I liked that approach so much that in 2016 I wrote a prototype to unlock the idea of functions but for your own infrastructure. It's now known as OpenFaaS and has over 30k GitHub stars, over 380 contributors and its community have given hundreds of blog posts and conference talks. There's ..read more

Today the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced the long awaited release of the Raspberry Pi 5. The first retail devices will be shipping to customers at the end of October. I got my hands on one and have been doing some early testing. So what's it like? What's new? And should you consider spending about 100 GBP to upgrade? Let's find out. The kind people at the Raspberry Pi Foundation sent out a number of tester units to the community, who in turn provide feedback. I received one, as did Jeff Geerling and a number of other people. I'll provide links to their articles at the end of this post. Her ..read more

One of the first things we ran into when building self-hosted GitHub Actions runners with Firecracker (actuated.dev) was the rate limits for the Docker Hub. We'd had a busy day updating the base image in a number of Dockerfiles due to a CVE found in Alpine Linux, and that triggered enough layers to be pulled for the Docker Hub to hit its anonymous image pull rate-limit. Why don't you see this on hosted CI? GitHub has an agreement with Docker, whereby hosted runners can pull either an unlimited amount or such a large amount of images from the Docker Hub, that limits are not going to be met by ..read more

Coming up with a title that explains the full story here was difficult, so I'm going to try to explain quickly. Yesterday, Docker sent an email to all Docker Hub users explaining that anyone who has created an "organisation" will have their account deleted including all images, if they do not upgrade to a paid team plan. The email contained a link to a tersely written PDF (since, silently edited) which was missing many important details which caused significant anxiety and additional work for open source maintainers. As far as we know, this only affects organisation accounts that are often u ..read more

You can use actuated's new CLI to calculate the total number of build minutes you're using across an organisation with GitHub Actions. I'm also going to show you: How to build tools rapidly, without worrying The best way to connect to the GitHub API using Go How to check your remaining rate limit for an access token A better way to integrate than using Access Tokens Further ways you could develop or contribute to this idea Why do we need this? If you log into the GitHub UI, you can request a CSV to be sent to your registered email address. This is a manual process and can take a few minutes ..read more

Around 6-8 months ago I started exploring MicroVMs out of curiosity. Around the same time, I saw an opportunity to fix self-hosted runners for GitHub Actions. Actuated is now in pilot and aims to solve most if not all of the friction. There's three parts to this post: A quick debrief on Firecracker and MicroVMs vs legacy solutions Exploring friction with GitHub Actions from a hosted and self-hosted perspective Blazing fast CI with Actuated, and additional materials for learning more about Firecracker 1) A quick debrief on Firecracker ? Firecracker is an open source virtualization technolog ..read more

When I heard about the Microsoft Dev Kit 2023, I was surprised by how generous the specifications were for the price? Naturally, I wanted to know if I could run Linux on it. You may also wonder. The answer is: kinda. I'm not sure why you are interested in ARM computers, but for me I got involved with them when porting software to the Raspberry Pi and helping support other Open Source projects to do the same. I maintain OpenFaaS, and it's always had support to run on ARM devices as well as larger on-premises or cloud servers. The team at Equinix Metal gave me access to large ARM servers, Amper ..read more

I want to show you how to use arkade in your GitHub Actions to get the typical kinds of tools you'll need to build code and run end-to-end tests. By the end of the post, I hope you'll see why developers are using arkade on their workstations andin CI instead of the more clunky alternatives. arkade has 3.1k GitHub Stars, 157 releases, over 110k downloads and over 72 contributors. Let's start right at the beginning. When I started the arkade project in 2019, it was all about making it easier to install Helm charts for Kubernetes clusters. In one instance, I was writing a tutorial for Civo, an ..read more