Announcing GitHub Actions Arm runners for the Arm Compute platform on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

GitHub Actions and OCI Arm

We’re excited to announce that Oracle and GitHub have teamed up to bring GitHub Actions runner support to the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Arm ecosystem. GitHub is the software collaboration platform home to more than 65 million developers, bringing people together to build the world’s most important technologies.

GitHub’s platform provides a home for a full DevOps lifecycle allowing teams to significantly reduce cycle times through more efficient collaboration, better visibility into projects across the company and an enhanced focus. With GitHub Actions, developers have access to fast-growing powerful flexible continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) where they already work: GitHub.

“GitHub Actions provides developers powerful, flexible, secure automation right in GitHub,” says Joe Bourne, director of product management at GitHub. “We’re excited to work with Oracle to bring choice to developers by ensuring GitHub Actions is supported for Oracle Cloud’s Arm-based Ampere A1 Compute platform. GitHub Actions runners support Arm architectures, and we’re encouraged to see partners like Oracle validate this technology to bring GitHub Actions to more developers and teams.”

Starting today, you can immediately use GitHub’s industry-leading CI/CD tooling, GitHub Actions, on OCI’s Ampere A1 platform. Combined with Oracle Cloud Free Tier resources, you can build and test your applications and open source projects for free.

GitHub Actions runner for OCI Arm architecture

GitHub Actions help to automate tasks within a software development lifecycle, and a runner is the machine on which a GitHub Actions job runs. A runner listens for available jobs, runs one at a time, and reports the progress, logs, and results to GitHub. Runners are offered as a managed service by GitHub, or they can be self-managed if you need more flexibility and control of your environment, such as a proprietary image or container, a more powerful machine, or to support multiple architectures like Arm.

With this announcement, OCI has made self-managing runners on Arm architecture easy. Deploy self-hosted runners to OCI and add them to your repository, organization, or enterprise. For more details on GitHub Actions self-hosted runners and supported platforms and architectures, see the GitHub documentation.

Deploy to Oracle Cloud

Adding a GitHub Actions self-hosted runner typically requires you to download, configure, and start the GitHub runner. To improve the user experience, we’ve automated the GitHub deployment to OCI instances.

The "Deploy to Oracle Cloud" button helps you deploy Terraform templates in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Resource Manager, and it offers a streamlined way to get started with third-party software. With a few clicks, you can have an Actions runner running in a matter of minutes.

Arm is faster and more efficient for some workloads than x86. GitHub Actions runner support of Arm processors on OCI opens opportunities for building the next generation of applications.

Want to learn more?

You can get started immediately with GitHub Actions on OCI Arm-based Ampere A1 instances by using Oracle Cloud Free Tier services. These services provide access to the highest-capacity free Arm compute and storage resources available in the market.

Combining Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Arm-based A1 compute shapes with GitHub Action runners gives developers a high-performance and scalable DevOps platform that’s production ready. To learn more about the increased efficiency of CI/CD, reduced risk, and service agility, or to get hands-on experience, see the following resources:

• Access the OCI Arm Resources Portal.
• Get started today with Oracle Cloud Free Tier.
• Learn more about GitHub Actions self-hosted runners and get started today.