Blazing fast CI with MicroVMs

Alex Ellis introduces Actuated, a semi-managed CI solution using Firecracker MicroVMs to fix the major pain points of GitHub Actions runners. Hosted runners are constrained (2 cores, 7GB RAM), lack ARM support, and limit concurrency. Self-hosted runners suffer from dirty state, Docker isolation issues, and security risks on public repos. Actuated solves these by spinning up a fresh, isolated MicroVM per build in under 2 seconds, supporting both x86 and ARM64, allowing Docker and Kubernetes workloads with full isolation, and enabling multiple concurrent builds on your own hardware. A real-world example showed ARM64 build times dropping from 33 minutes (QEMU) to 1m26s using Actuated on bare metal.