Runners & infrastructure
Vendor-neutral coverage of runners & infrastructure.
Articles
21 articlesKubernetes 1.37 turns native histograms on by default for its own metrics
The Prometheus native-histogram format graduates to beta in Kubernetes 1.37 and ships enabled by default, promising smaller time-series and sharper latency percentiles for the metrics the control plane already emits.
Sep 12, 2026 · Maya OkonkwoRunners & infrastructureKubernetes 1.37 promotes gang scheduling to a first-class Workload API in beta
Kubernetes v1.37 graduates the Workload and PodGroup APIs, Workload-Aware Preemption, and shared DRA ResourceClaims to beta, moving all-or-nothing scheduling out of third-party operators. A new CompositePodGroup API lands in alpha for hierarchical training topologies.
Sep 12, 2026 · Maya OkonkwoRunners & infrastructureXcode 27 runner image on GitHub-hosted macOS moves to macOS 27
GitHub bumped the operating system underneath its public-preview Xcode 27 runner image from macOS 26 to macOS 27, per the September 10 changelog. The runner labels stay the same, so the OS shift lands on the next job that requests them, with no workflow edit.
Sep 11, 2026 · Maya OkonkwoRunners & infrastructureGitLab Dedicated stops asking you to run the runners
GitLab Dedicated now ships with hosted runners, so single-tenant customers no longer have to build and patch their own fleet. Every other hosted CI splits the same problem differently, and each split has a rough edge.
Sep 7, 2026 · Priya NairRunners & infrastructureA slimmer Dragonfly for teams who just want faster image pulls
A CNCF post walks through a lightweight Dragonfly install that keeps peer-to-peer image and file distribution, but drops the Manager, MySQL and Redis. If registry pulls are your CI's slowest step, this is the shape of Dragonfly worth trying first.
Aug 24, 2026 · Priya NairRunners & infrastructureWindows 11 arm64 with VS2026 goes GA on GitHub-hosted runners
GitHub Actions promoted its Windows 11 arm64 image with Visual Studio 2026 to general availability on both standard and larger GitHub-hosted runners. For teams shipping native ARM Windows binaries out of CI, the self-hosted detour stops being the only option.
Aug 24, 2026 · Maya OkonkwoRunners & infrastructureGitHub says 2.9 billion commits a month, and CI is the downstream tenant
The New Stack puts GitHub's monthly load at 2.9 billion commits, 130 million merged pull requests and 24 million new repositories, and reports the platform is straining under it. For teams running on Actions, that is a queue-depth story more than a growth story.
Aug 21, 2026 · Maya OkonkwoRunners & infrastructureAzure Pipelines opens an arm64 macOS preview with Xcode 27 in the pay-as-you-go pool
Microsoft added Apple Silicon macOS agents carrying Xcode 27 to Azure DevOps as a public preview, delivered through the pay-as-you-go GitHub-hosted Agents pool. For iOS and macOS pipelines that have been running Xcode on Rosetta-under-Intel agents, the native arm64 path is finally in reach on a Microsoft-hosted fleet.
Aug 19, 2026 · Maya OkonkwoRunners & infrastructureDocker VMM goes public beta with Docker Desktop's virtualizer rewritten in-house
Docker Desktop v4.86 ships a rewritten first-party virtualizer as a public beta on Mac and Windows, with Linux deferred to a GA targeted for the end of October.
Aug 19, 2026 · Maya OkonkwoRunners & infrastructureMulti-gigabyte image pulls are now the EKS cold-start problem
The New Stack walks through why container image pull time has become a first-class bottleneck on Amazon EKS, driven by machine-learning workloads that ship in much larger images than a typical application. Pull latency is now something CI/CD and platform teams have to design for, not wait out.
Aug 12, 2026 · Maya OkonkwoRunners & infrastructureLinkerd 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