Hi everyone, hope all is well. We are working on BEAM 12812 <https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/BEAM-12812> and we have some questions regarding the Windows Self-hosted runners.
The requirement is to migrate the existing runners to GKE and we have been working on a container based approach using the following image mcr.microsoft.com/windows/servercore:ltsc2019, when using Kubernetes some critical features needed for test compatibility are not available on Windows container image, such as Windows Subsystem for Linux or direct installation of VS Build Tools. Due to those container limitations, some tests were rewritten or adapted to run on both Linux and Windows environments, but this is going to be also required when future tests or steps are added. In addition, to build some tests VS Build Tools is required as well as some dependencies that make the image size grow to 20GB easily, which is not an optimal use case for containers. For the above reasons we are wondering if Kubernetes approach is the best one for this case or if we should start thinking about switching to Virtual Machines instead. Today we ran “Python tests” and “Build Python Source distribution and wheels” workflows in a Windows GCE Instance without further changes and we found that almost all the tests are passing and some of them have minor issues compared with K8s ones. In the below table you can find some of the pros and cons of using VMs against K8s. We would like to know your thoughts on this case in order to find the best approach for Windows Self Hosted Runners. Please let us know if you have any comments or questions, thank you. Regards -- Elias Edgardo Segundo Antonio (He/Him) | <https://www.wizeline.com/> | wizeline.com <https://www.wizeline.com/> Site Reliability Engineer I [email protected] | +52 712 2722589 (m) Remote Office, Mexico -- *This email and its contents (including any attachments) are being sent to you on the condition of confidentiality and may be protected by legal privilege. Access to this email by anyone other than the intended recipient is unauthorized. If you are not the intended recipient, please immediately notify the sender by replying to this message and delete the material immediately from your system. Any further use, dissemination, distribution or reproduction of this email is strictly prohibited. Further, no representation is made with respect to any content contained in this email.*
