I don't use GHA as some of our code is stored in Perforce, but we've faced the same challenges with EC2 instance startup times on our self managed runners on a different provider.
We would happily pay someone like depot for "here's the AMI I want to run & autoscale, can you please do it faster than AWS?"
We hit this problem with containers too - we'd _love_ to just run all our CI on something like fargate and have it automatically scale and respond to our demand, but the response times and rate limting are just _so slow_ that it means instead we just end up starting/stopping instances with a lambda which feels so 2014.
We would happily pay someone like depot for "here's the AMI I want to run & autoscale, can you please do it faster than AWS?"
We hit this problem with containers too - we'd _love_ to just run all our CI on something like fargate and have it automatically scale and respond to our demand, but the response times and rate limting are just _so slow_ that it means instead we just end up starting/stopping instances with a lambda which feels so 2014.