Why Blacksmith?

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We make teams more productive with GitHub Actions

We hate slow CI. Blacksmith provides a managed solution featuring high-performance runners for GitHub Actions, designed for seamless integration with a one-line code change. Blacksmith provides up to double the speed of GitHub’s hosted runners and cuts costs by over 50% (often closer to 75%).

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Key reasons to use Blacksmith

• We’re substantially faster: We orchestrate jobs over our fleet of modern gaming CPUs which have significantly higher single-thread performance compared to their server counterparts. Blacksmith is twice as fast as GitHub’s decade-old server hardware for most CI jobs. Learn more about our runners here.

• We’re able to provision runners instantly: Blacksmith runs jobs in ephemeral Firecracker microVMs which boot up in less than 3 seconds, regardless of runner size. We maintain our own homogenous pool of compute, so your CI jobs don’t compete with other on-demand workloads like they would on a hyperscaler like AWS.

• We’re less than half the cost: Our runners are exactly half the cost of GitHub’s per minute. Since Blacksmith runners are also faster, you will consume fewer minutes than on GitHub. Discover your potential savings with Blacksmith here.

• We’re a drop-in replacement: Blacksmith runners boot off of the same image(s) as GitHub’s runners and have the exact same environment. Transitioning to Blacksmith is as simple as changing a single line in your workflow file.

• We co-locate your cache right next to your runners: Our custom useblacksmith/cache action quadruples cache throughput to 400MB/s, significantly outperforming GitHub’s cache actions/cache@v3. Read more about our cache action here.