About CI Runners
Quant CI runners run your GitHub Actions jobs on machines that Quant hosts in Australia. You keep your workflows on GitHub and change one line in each job, the runs-on line.
A runner pool is the unit you create and pay for. A pool has a fixed size, so the monthly price does not change with the number of jobs you run.
What you get
Section titled “What you get”- Machines that are yours alone. Each pool runs on its own virtual machines. Two customers never share a machine, a Docker daemon, a disk or a cache.
- Docker works as it does on GitHub-hosted runners.
docker build,docker run, service containers and Docker Compose all work. - arm64 and x64. A pool can offer Graviton (arm64) runners, Intel (x64) runners, or both, so you can build each image on its native architecture without emulation.
- Secrets and variables on Quant. You can keep CI secrets in Quant and read them in a workflow with the usual
${{ secrets.NAME }}syntax. See Secrets and Variables. - A fixed monthly price. The tier sets how many jobs run at once. When every slot is busy, new jobs wait in the queue and start when a slot is free.
Pool tiers
Section titled “Pool tiers”| Tier | Concurrent jobs | Each job gets |
|---|---|---|
| Small | 2 | 2 vCPU, 7 GB memory, 50 GB disk |
| Medium | 4 | 4 vCPU, 14 GB memory, 75 GB disk |
| Large | 8 | 4 vCPU, 14 GB memory, 75 GB disk |
The create form shows the monthly price of each tier. You can move a pool to a larger tier at any time.
How a job runs
Section titled “How a job runs”- GitHub tells Quant that a job with your pool’s labels is waiting.
- Quant starts a machine for your pool if none is running, and registers a single-use runner on it.
- The job runs in a fresh container. When the job ends, the runner and its container are removed.
- When the pool has been idle for the idle timeout you chose, its machines stop.
The first job after an idle period waits about a minute for a machine to start. You can keep one machine running during your business hours to avoid that wait.
What is different from GitHub-hosted runners
Section titled “What is different from GitHub-hosted runners”- The image is lean. It has Docker, Git, the GitHub CLI, the AWS CLI, Node.js,
jq,yqandzstd. It does not carry every language toolchain thatubuntu-latestdoes, so install the tools a job needs with a setup action such asactions/setup-node,actions/setup-pythonoractions/setup-go. The tool cache is at the same path as on GitHub-hosted runners, and those actions work unchanged. - Private repositories only. Quant runners refuse jobs from public repositories, because a pull request from a fork could otherwise run a stranger’s code on your machines.
- Linux only. There are no Windows, macOS or GPU runners.
- github.com only. GitHub Enterprise Server is not supported.
- Job logs stay on GitHub. You read them in the Actions tab as you do today.
Availability
Section titled “Availability”CI runners are available on QuantCDN and QuantGov to every organisation that has Quant Cloud access through a Teams Lite subscription or higher. They are not available during a trial, because a pool has a fixed monthly price.
If you do not see CI runners in the Cloud section of the dashboard, contact support.