Scaling systems is a process that is often counter-intuitive. It’s not just about adding more resources. It’s about understanding the bottlenecks and how to overcome them. After years spent troubleshooting highly scaled systems, I’ve learned a few things that can make the journey easier.

What are the best practices best practices for upgrading your ARC cluster? Want to know whether you can safely run without taking the latest releases? In this post, we’ll explore the answers to both of these questions.

If you’re using Actions Runner Controller, the provided base image may not be enough. In fact, it’s important to build your own to ensure that you have all the dependencies you need for your workflows.

Minimizing network activity improves your build times, speeds up builds, and reduces costs. With ARC, you rely on multiple Actions steps in your workflow. What if you could avoid needing to download your most frequently used Actions? This post walks you through creating images with an Actions archive cache to eliminate those downloads.

If you’re going to build custom images for ARC or standalone VM runners, then you probably want to take some time to preload it with the tools that matter to your builds. If you want that process to work well for the GitHub-provided tools and actions/setup- Actions, then you’ll want to know how to prepopulate the runner’s tool cache.