Why self-hosted runners mattered
The “compute layer” that made Copilot-in-the-cloud workflows practical.
GitHub Actions workflows
Self-hosted runner
WSL (Ubuntu on Windows)
Windows PC hardware
Benefits
- Full environment control (real tools, real creds, real caches)
- No minute limits / no surprise costs
- Fast iteration loops (especially for content + data pipelines)
- Easy to add “local-only” capabilities without shipping services