DevOps / Github Interview questions
What is the difference between GitHub-hosted runners and self-hosted runners?
GitHub-hosted runners are virtual machines GitHub provisions fresh for each job and destroys afterward; self-hosted runners are machines a team registers themselves, which persist between runs.
| GitHub-hosted | Self-hosted |
| Zero setup; managed entirely by GitHub. | Requires installing and maintaining the runner agent. |
| Clean environment every run. | State can persist between runs (useful and risky). |
| Limited to GitHub's provided OS images and hardware specs. | Full control over hardware, OS, and installed software. |
| Usage billed by the minute (with a free allowance per plan). | Compute cost is whatever the organization already pays for the machine. |
Teams reach for self-hosted runners when they need specific hardware (GPUs for ML workloads), access to an internal network GitHub-hosted runners can't reach, or when Actions minute costs at high volume make owning the compute cheaper than paying per-minute.
Which type of runner starts from a completely clean environment on every job?
A common reason to choose self-hosted runners is:
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