Runners & infrastructure
Vendor-neutral coverage of runners & infrastructure.
Articles
11 articlesLinkerd federation keeps the app running when a whole Kubernetes cluster dies
A CNCF walk-through by Dominik Táskai wires three GKE clusters into a full-mesh Linkerd multicluster and kills one. The nine-pod frontend rebalances across the surviving six with no application changes, but the setup pays a real price at the VPC, node-count and controller layers.
Jul 28, 2026 · Maya OkonkwoRunners & infrastructureThe 60% idle GPU that turned out to be a network policy
A CNCF write-up walks through a distributed Kubeflow training job whose GPUs sat around 60% idle while every pod reported healthy. The failure lived one layer down, in a Cilium policy enforcing zone boundaries that gradient sync had to cross.
Jul 23, 2026 · Maya OkonkwoRunners & infrastructureGPUs keep falling off the PCIe bus, and standard node health does not notice
AWS engineers write up what running Kubernetes at Amazon EKS scale taught them about GPU node failure, and why the default node health model has nothing to say when the GPU just vanishes from the bus.
Jul 20, 2026 · Maya OkonkwoRunners & infrastructureXcode 27 lands on GitHub-hosted runners, and the naming rule quietly changed
GitHub Actions added an Xcode 27 image in public preview on its arm64 macOS runners. The bigger shift is buried in the changelog: images are now keyed to the Xcode major version instead of the OS, one Xcode per image.
Jul 19, 2026 · Priya NairRunners & infrastructureAWS puts gray zone failures into the EKS control loop
The New Stack details how AWS treats non-obvious availability zone degradation as its own category on EKS, with zonal shift moving traffic away from an impaired zone before the traditional alarms fire. For CI/CD teams, it reframes what a regional resilience test needs to cover.
Jul 12, 2026 · Maya OkonkwoRunners & infrastructureDynamic Resource Allocation hits GA in Kubernetes 1.35, and GPU CI jobs finally get a real API
DRA reached general availability in Kubernetes v1.35, and the NVIDIA DRA driver has dropped its Beta label. For teams running GPU workloads through Kubernetes-backed pipelines, it replaces a decade of nodeSelector gymnastics with a first-class request primitive.
Jul 2, 2026 · Priya NairRunners & infrastructureGitHub-hosted larger runners pick up RHEL 9 and RHEL 10 in public preview
GitHub's larger hosted runners now offer Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 and 10 images in public preview, a partnership with Red Hat aimed at shops that have been self-hosting Actions just to keep production-like CI on Red Hat.
Jun 29, 2026 · Maya OkonkwoRunners & infrastructureGitHub lets org admins switch off the default hosted runner labels
Organizations on Actions can now disable standard hosted runner labels such as `ubuntu-latest` at the org level, per the June 25 changelog. The toggle turns the default runner pool from an implicit allowlist into a catalogue platform teams have to maintain.
Jun 28, 2026 · Maya OkonkwoRunners & infrastructureGitHub Actions lets custom runner images stack on other custom images
Custom images for GitHub-hosted runners can now be built on top of other custom images, per the June 18 changelog. The shift turns runner provisioning into a layered chain that platform teams can govern the same way they manage container base images.
Jun 19, 2026 · Maya OkonkwoRunners & infrastructureGitHub Actions resumes self-hosted runner version enforcement
Self-hosted runners must register on 2.329.0 or later and install each new release within 30 days, with full enforcement landing September 25, 2026 on github.com. The change moves runner version management from a hygiene task into a fleet-inventory problem.
Jun 15, 2026 · Maya OkonkwoRunners & infrastructureARM-based CI runners go mainstream, what it means for build costs
Hosted ARM64 runners are now generally available across the major CI clouds. For many builds they cut minutes-billing meaningfully, but only if your toolchain is already multi-arch.
Jun 14, 2026 · Maya Okonkwo