It spawns ephemeral EC2/Azure instances, which is a lot cheaper than the GitHub actions runners we used before that.

We shard to a lot of machines for tests and I’d be worried about running out if we used dedicated servers.

BuildKite is fine but I wouldn’t be that surprised if we move off of BuildKite to a custom thing at some point. Months ago, we switched from CMake to a handrolled typescript build system and it made our builds faster and simpler.

Presumably because they "build for [macOS, Linux, FreeBSD, Android, Windows] x [ARM64, x64]" and self hosting all of that would be time-consuming and expensive.

Probably because they don't want to self-host Windows or MacOS servers when they can pay someone else to do that for them (or Linux ones, I assume that is within their wheelhouse for production but CI is a bit of a different beast to model inference).