Use pre-built docker images for some actions. #627
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- Specifically the actions that are used in the frequent stacks Poll USNs job. - Using pre-built images reduces flakiness in GitHub Actions pipeline associated with failure to build the images on demand.
ryanmoran
approved these changes
Nov 15, 2022
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@sophiewigmore approved the direction of this PR in the linked issue (#625), so I'm going to merge this now that we have explicit approval from another tooling maintainer. |
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In case it wasn't clear to folks, because this is a change to the actions, not the workflows, the changes will be picked up immediately - we don't need to sync the github config. We can already see it working (and it turns out it's about 2x faster to pull the images vs build them, but these are small numbers that don't really matter):
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Summary
This PR changes a few actions to use pre-built docker images rather than building them inline. This improves reliability as building these images has an observed failure rate of about 0.5%, or about 10 times per day across the Paketo stacks.
It doesn't have any noticeable impact on performance as the download time is comparable to the time taken to build the image.
Background
The actions that have been changed are the ones that are used most commonly in the Stacks Poll USNs job, which runs on a schedule. We maintain seven stacks (Bionic Full, Base, Tiny and Jammy Full, Base, Tiny, Static), and each stack runs the Poll USNs job every 10 minutes. That means we run about 70 times per hour, or about 1700 times per day. We typically see about 10 failures per day, hence the 0.5% failure rate.
We have manually built and pushed these docker images to GitHub Container Registry - they can be seen on the packages page for the Paketo Buildpacks organization.
Future work
We should create a job that will build and push these images on a schedule. That can be done separately from this PR, however, as the images are not security-critical (they don't end up in any product or tool - they are just used in CI) so they can afford to be a little out of date.
Closes #625. See that issue for more context.
Checklist