Part of mastering Kubernetes or containers is understanding how they work and how they interact with the host system. You’ve probably seen how to mount drives or folders into a containerized system, but there is another approach – mounting a file like a drive. This post will explore how to do this using a loop device in Linux.

Working with containers, one concept that seems to always confuse developers and administrators is layers. Despite the elegance and simplicity of the design, they are still a black box to most teams. In this post, I’ll explain how they work conceptually and the basis of their implementation.

Continuing the discussion from last week, here are a few additional recommendations that can improve your ability to manage and scale your ARC deployments.

There are some common issues that lead to teams struggling to set up ARC. Nearly all of these can be avoided by following a few simple guidelines. In the first of a two-part post, I’ll outline some of my recommendations for improving your experience setting up ARC.

GitHub ARC is a great way to run your GitHub Actions runners in your own Kubernetes cluster. ARC has its own set of requirements and best practices. One of the most important best practices I recommend is to use a dedicated Kubernetes cluster. This post will explain why.

I’ve been spending a lot of time helping companies to adopt GitHub ARC over the last few months. They are excited to be able to create self-hosted runners on-demand on Kubernetes. The biggest challenge many of them have is getting started, and the root of this problem often starts with realizing there are two different versions of ARC. In many cases, they started with the wrong one. This post will explain the difference.

GitHub’s Actions Runner Controller (ARC) offers a lot of great features, including metrics. These metrics give you visibility to the processing queue as well as the performance of runners and jobs. Enabling this feature is surprisingly easy. This post will show you how.

I like having my SSH commit signing automatically configured. In a previous article, I discussed how you can do this using your dotfiles repository. If you want to add support for reading the SSH keys from 1Password, then there are just a few more things you need to know.

I’ve seen lots of teams trying to increase the availability of GitHub runners for their organization by implementing GitHub Actions Runner Controller (ARC). In some cases, they hope to try to exceed GitHub’s 99.9% SLA. Unfortunately, the math works against them. In this post, I’ll explain why.

One challenge with the GitHub’s Actions Runner Controller (ARC) is that it does not officially support Windows containers for the runners. With a little bit of work, though, it’s possible to make this configuration work on a hybrid Linux/Windows cluster.