Minimizing network activity improves your build times, speeds up builds, and reduces costs. With ARC, you rely on multiple Actions steps in your workflow. What if you could avoid needing to download your most frequently used Actions? This post walks you through creating images with an Actions archive cache to eliminate those downloads.

If you’re going to build custom images for ARC or standalone VM runners, then you probably want to take some time to preload it with the tools that matter to your builds. If you want that process to work well for the GitHub-provided tools and actions/setup- Actions, then you’ll want to know how to prepopulate the runner’s tool cache.

Understanding ARC begins with understanding what it does (and does not do) to create runners on Kubernetes. The process is surprisingly straight-forward, and understanding it is key to mastering ARC.

Continuing the discussion from last week, here are a few additional recommendations that can improve your ability to manage and scale your ARC deployments.

There are some common issues that lead to teams struggling to set up ARC. Nearly all of these can be avoided by following a few simple guidelines. In the first of a two-part post, I’ll outline some of my recommendations for improving your experience setting up ARC.