Runners: Self-host Gitpod in under 3 minutes
On October 1, 2024 we launched Gitpod Flex, and announced that it’s available self-hosted in less than 3 minutes. Deploying in ‘Less than 3 minutes’ is only possible because of Gitpod Flex’s unique runner-based infrastructure that keeps your source code secure, installs exceptionally fast with fixed costs that are virtually zero.
So, what are runners? Runners are single-tenant, self-hosted orchestrators for your team’s development environments. They are self-hosted in order to isolate all your sensitive information related to your development environments, such as your source code, your network access or data. Runners ensure these critical assets never leave your private network.
The first runner that Gitpod supports today is AWS, with more planned.
Runners are also responsible for operational tasks like:
- Scaling
- Backup
- Caching
- Version updating
Which means that you should never need to login to your cloud account to parse through logs, reboot machines or any manual operational labor. All configuration of Gitpod runners can be managed simply through the user interface. You don’t need to be an AWS or infrastructure expert. It’s meant to be an ‘install and forget’ process.
Runners only need to be set up once, and can be used by the entire team. An organization may have only one runner for all their development environments, or as many as needed for the purposes of latency/regionality or compliance.
What gets deployed into your AWS account is a fargate ECS task, a small DynamoDB table and some IAM configuration. This architecture is what makes the fixed cost of the runners exceptionally low—even being covered by the AWS free tier.
Installing a runner takes around 3 minutes. The product and our getting started docs will take you through an easy to follow, step-by-step setup that just requires access to an AWS account. During setup, you’ll execute a pre-populated CloudFormation template.
When using runners to self-host your team’s environments, you will only pay for the development environments in use. The fixed costs are virtually zero and are even covered by the AWS free tier. And custom timeouts prevent environments from running longer than they should.
Create your own runner in under 3 minutes today, to self-host Gitpod Flex.
Also, if you prefer running your environments locally on your Mac with cloud-like consistency, take a look at Gitpod Desktop.