As many enterprises start to scale utilizing CircleCI’s cloud offering, due to the need for privileged access & controls and unique compute requirements for some jobs, we launched self-hosted runners. Self-hosted runners enable engineering teams to use their own infrastructure for running jobs. A machine runner executes each job with a one to one mapping between a job and a VM launched in the same environment as the machine runner binary.

Due to the benefits users sacrificed in the above model in comparison to using a container-based solution, CircleCI has launched Container Runner. A user can install this game changing technology in a private Kubernetes cluster, thus enabling them to run containerized CI builds on self-hosted compute in a similar fashion to how jobs that use the native Docker executor run on CircleCI’s cloud platform.

Once the installation of the container agent binary is complete, the container agent will monitor CircleCI for Docker jobs that are configured to execute on it. It will then schedule them within an ephemeral pod and execute the work within a container-based execution environment.

The session will include a guided presentation and demonstration of the container agent solution.