Deploy GitHub Actions Self-Hosted Runner on Google Axion C4A virtual machine
Introduction
About Google Axion and GitHub Actions
Create the instance
Set up a GitHub Self-Hosted Runner
Deploy NGINX with the GitHub runner
Next Steps
Deploy GitHub Actions Self-Hosted Runner on Google Axion C4A virtual machine
Overview
This section walks you through creating a Google Axion C4A Arm virtual machine on Google Cloud with the c4a-standard-4 (4 vCPUs, 16 GB memory) machine type using the Google Cloud Console. You will use this VM later as the host for a GitHub Actions self-hosted runner.
If you don’t have a Google Cloud account, see the Learning Path Getting started with Google Cloud Platform .
Create an Arm-based virtual machine (C4A)
Follow these steps in the Google Cloud Console:
- Open the Google Cloud Console .
- Go to Navigation menu ▸ Compute Engine ▸ VM instances, then select Create instance.
- Under Machine configuration:
- Enter Instance name, Region, and Zone
- Set Series to
C4A - Choose a machine type such as
c4a-standard-4
- Under OS and storage, select Change, pick Ubuntu as the operating system, and choose Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Minimal. Make sure you select the Arm image variant.
- Under Networking, enable Allow HTTP traffic so you can test workloads like NGINX later.
- Select Create to launch the instance.
Create a C4A VM in the Google Cloud Console
Do not leave Allow HTTP traffic enabled permanently. For long-term use, allow traffic only from the IP addresses you use to connect to the instance.
Access the VM from the instance list by selecting SSH in the instance overview. Use this command line interface (CLI) to run the commands in the remainder of this Learning Path.