Overview

Ubicloud runners provide a number of price/performance advantages over GitHub runners. These include:
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• Prices are 10x cheaper than GitHub Actions
• Ubicloud Runners outperform GitHub Runners even at this price point
• 1-line change for benefits to take effect
• Ubicloud cloud services are available under the Elastic V2 license, if you choose to manage your infrastructure yourself

Usage Pricing

Ubicloud runners come with dedicated CPU, memory, local block storage, and a public IPv4 address. Our GitHub Managed Runner Application allocates virtual machines (VMs) across Germany and Finland regions to provide high availability.

We charge only for usage and at per minute granularity. Every account gets a $1/month credit that's equivalent to 1,250 minutes of Ubicloud runner time.

The tag ubicloud defaults to 2 vCPUs. Given Ubicloud's price advantage, we recommend trying 4 vCPUs if your pipeline benefits from parallelism. Prices below are in US cents to make comparison with GitHub Runner prices (first row) easier.

Concurrency Limits

By default, all Ubicloud for GitHub Actions accounts can run a total of 64 concurrent vCPUs. This concurrency limit represents the maximum number of vCPUs that can be active in parallel across all runners and enables faster completion of queued workflow runs.

For example, with the default concurrency limit of 64 vCPUs, you can run 32 xubicloud-standard-2 instances in parallel. Or, you can concurrently run 8 x ubicloud-standard-4 and 4 x ubicloud-standard-8 instances.

If your project requires additional concurrency beyond the default limits, you can add Concurrency Extensions to your account. Each extension increases your capacity by 64 vCPUs for an additional fee. To learn more or buy additional Concurrency Extensions, please contact us at support@ubicloud.com.

Performance

In addition to being 10x more cost-effective, Ubicloud runners are also faster. This is because Ubicloud VMs run on newer hardware than those of GitHub's Azure VMs.
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Below is a sample of run times across open source projects for GitHub and Ubicloud runners. We also display Ubicloud 4 vCore runner times. Since Ubicloud comes with a significant price advantage, we recommend trying more powerful runners for faster builds.

Repo source: https://github.com/facebook/folly (C++ Build and Test)
Run source: https://github.com/enescakir/astrobee/actions/runs/6403956193
Run date: 2023-10-04

Repo source: https://github.com/google/xls (C++ Build and Test)
Run source: https://github.com/enescakir/xls/actions/runs/6405033359
Run date: 2023-10-04

Repo source: https://github.com/PeerDB-io/peerdb (Rust Cargo Build and Test)
Run source: https://github.com/enescakir/peerdb/actions/runs/6404580654
Run date: 2023-10-04