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DevOps / Github Interview questions

What is a GitHub Actions runner?

A runner is the machine (virtual or physical) that actually executes a workflow's jobs: checking out code, running scripts, and reporting status back to GitHub. GitHub provides GitHub-hosted runners (Ubuntu, Windows, and macOS images spun up fresh for each job and torn down after), and teams can register their own self-hosted runners for custom hardware, network access, or software not available on the hosted images.

GitHub-hosted runners are the default and require no setup, but every job starts from a clean image, so nothing installed during a previous run persists. Self-hosted runners persist state between runs (which can be either convenient or a source of subtle drift) and are registered per repository, organization, or enterprise.

GitHub-hosted runners are torn down:
A common reason to use a self-hosted runner is:

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