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Standby Disks

WarpBuild allows you to create a pool of standby disks for each runner type on BYOC. This enables runners to be booted up in ~15seconds.

What are standby disks?​

Standby disks are VMs of the same type as the runner, that are immediately shut down after boot up. This initializes the VM, sets up networking, and other configurations.

This pre-initialization of the VM allows the runner to be booted up and the job to start in ~15 seconds.

The instance type of a standby disk is the same as the runner type. If there are fallback instance types selected, the standby disk will be one of the multiple instance types.

Configuration​

The number of standby disks is configurable per custom runner for BYOC runners.

💡 Note: Choose the number of standby disks based on the number of jobs you expect to run concurrently for that runner type.

Standby Disks

How it works​

When GitHub requests a runner, WarpBuild checks if a standby disk is available. If one is available, it is booted up and used for the job. If one is not available, a new VM is created for allocation to the job.

The WarpBuild control plane ensures that the pool of standby disks is maintained, within reconciliation time limits (~1min).

Cost implication​

The VM for initializing a standby disk is billable for ~90 seconds, after which it will be shut down. Once the VM is shut down, the network disk is still billable but the VM is not.

Overall, the cost implication is minimal for using this feature.

Pricing​

WarpBuild does not charge for standby disks.