They had working infra and a great case for keeping fairly "close to the metal". Complicated files-heavy workload that needs tons of clever caching to perform well, lots of writes, lots of non-HTTP TCP traffic.

Retrofitting that into "cloud" bullshit is such a bad idea.

meh, I dunno.

Using bare-metal requires competent Unix admins, and Actions team is full of javascript clowns (see: decision to use dashes in environment variable; lack of any sort of shell quoting support in templates; keeping logs next to binaries in self-hosted runners). Perhaps they would be better off using infra someone else maintains.

  > requires competent Unix admins

Who knows where a $3.7T company is ever going to find competent Unix admins...

  > Perhaps they would be better off using infra someone else maintains.

They're handing it from themselves to themselves. We're talking about Microsoft, not some startup.

> Using bare-metal requires competent Unix admins

So does running VMs in a cloud provider.

Except now we call them "DevOps" or "SRE" and pay them 1.5-2x.

(as a former SRE myself, I'm not complaining).