Future of self hosted runners?

[EdwardCooke]

Why are you starting this discussion?

Question

What GitHub Actions topic or product is this about?

ARC (Actions Runner Controller)

Discussion Details

In this PR it states contributions are no longer being accepted to the self hosted runner repository without an explanation of what the future plan of the runner repository is. There's still some contributions coming in though. What's the future of self hosted runners? Is it going away eventually? Can we get some more details about the future plans of self hosted runners? It also states that that you're focusing development efforts on other areas than the self hosted runner. Just some concerns there about the viability of using self hosted runners in the future.

actions/runner#3898

[pratikrath126]

Self-hosted runners are fully supported and not going away. The PR comment reflects a shift in contribution process (more review, focus on internal improvements) rather than deprecation. GitHub continues to invest in the runner and ARC. You can safely keep using self-hosted runners. Watch the actions/runner repo for official updates.

[Farhxn-15]

Yeah, I understand why that change raised concerns. Seeing contributions closed or redirected can make it feel like self hosted runners are being phased out, but that is not what is happening.

Self hosted runners are still a core part of GitHub Actions, especially for organizations that need custom hardware, private networking, compliance controls, or cost optimization. They are widely used in enterprise environments and are not going away.

What is changing is where GitHub is focusing active development.

The actions runner project has matured and is considered stable infrastructure. Because of that, GitHub tends to limit direct feature contributions and instead focuses development on higher level orchestration and scalability tooling.

That is where Actions Runner Controller (ARC) and larger scale runner management solutions come in.

Some important context:

• The base runner is stable and widely deployed, so fewer core changes are needed.
• GitHub is investing more in orchestration, autoscaling, and fleet management.
• ARC enables Kubernetes based scaling and is becoming the preferred solution for large scale environments.
• Hosted runners continue to evolve for convenience, but self hosted runners remain essential for specialized workloads.

The PR you referenced reflects governance and maintenance direction rather than deprecation. It helps keep the core runner stable while innovation happens around it.

So the future likely looks like this:

Self hosted runners
→ remain supported and widely used

ARC and orchestration layers
→ become the main focus for scaling and management

Hosted runners
→ continue improving for ease of use

If you rely on self hosted runners today, there is no indication that they are being retired. Instead, the ecosystem around managing them at scale is where most innovation is happening.

If anything, the direction suggests maturation rather than deprecation.

[EdwardCooke]

Thank you both for the detailed answers. We use self hosted runners with ARC already and wanted to make sure that they where going to be continued.