# CI Compute Router

*/Opportunities/CI_Compute_Router*

## Opportunity Overview

**Wedge**: The initial beachhead focuses on organizations using GitHub Actions for large-scale, high-concurrency automated testing on AWS. GitHub's default runners charge a steep premium, allowing the router to prove immediate, measurable cost reduction by shifting jobs to managed EC2 spot instances. Once established in the testing pipeline, the product expands to orchestrate all build and deployment jobs across diverse infrastructure, including bare-metal servers and specialized GPU instances.
**Timing**: Engineering organizations face intense pressure to reduce ballooning GitHub Actions and AWS bills, while the strict standardization of containerized CI jobs makes workload portability immediate. Concurrently, varying spot instance eviction rates across cloud providers require programmatic arbitrage rather than manual provisioning.
**Why This I C P**: Platform Engineering and DevOps teams hold the direct mandate to manage cloud infrastructure budgets while guaranteeing developer velocity. They possess the administrative access to CI platforms required to install the routing webhook and are directly accountable for infrastructure cost overruns.
**Size Of Prize**: Approximately 35,000 mid-market and enterprise software organizations operate large-scale CI pipelines. Charging an average annual platform fee of $30,000 per organization yields a total addressable prize of $1.05B.
**Gap Narrative**: Engineering teams hardcode CI runner environments, forcing test suites and builds onto static, often expensive, cloud instances. As monorepos and test matrices grow, this static allocation causes either massive compute waste from idle instances or severe developer bottlenecks from queued jobs. DevOps teams require a dynamic routing layer that intercepts CI triggers and dispatches workloads to the optimal compute target based on real-time cost, spot availability, and hardware requirements.
**Defensibility**: Defensibility stems from workflow lock-in and switching costs. Once integrated at the repository level as the default CI runner target, removing the router instantly degrades developer performance and inflates the monthly cloud bill. The system also builds an execution history database, using past job telemetry to predict runtimes and optimize bin-packing, making the routing engine more efficient the longer it remains deployed.
**Why This Thesis**: Deploying deterministic control plane software matches the strict security and predictability requirements of DevOps. Engineering teams reject opaque agents for CI execution, requiring explicit rules engines and auditable routing logs to ensure compliance and debug infrastructure failures.

## Opportunity Linked Thesis

**Thesis**: [Software](/Theses/Software)

## Opportunity Linked I C P

**Icp**: [Enterprise Software Company](/CompanyTypes/Enterprise_Software_Company)

## Opportunity Market Sizing

_Illustrative — target and order-of-magnitude estimate figures, not an achieved track record (this Thing is concept-stage)._

**S A M**: ~$800M - $1.2B representing the ~20,000 large enterprise software companies operating complex multi-cloud or hybrid CI compute pipelines
**S O M**: ~$10M - $25M attainable over a 3-year period based on direct enterprise sales and deployment capacity
**T A M**: ~100,000 global mid-market and enterprise software organizations × ~$40,000/yr average CI optimization tooling spend ≈ ~$4B
**Growth Rate**: ~18-25%/yr, driven by expanding microservice architectures and the increasing compute intensity of automated test suites
**Paid Comparable Spend**: ~$150,000 - $300,000/yr spent on 1-2 dedicated DevOps engineers maintaining custom autoscaling scripts, plus the premium paid for unoptimized, always-on default cloud runners

## Opportunity Incumbents

- [GitHub Hosted Runners](/Products/GitHub_Hosted_Runners) — Service
- [GitLab Shared Runners](/Products/GitLab_Shared_Runners) — Service
- [Actions Runner Controller](/Products/Actions_Runner_Controller) — Open-Source
- [Gitlab Runner Chart](/Products/Gitlab_Runner_Chart) — Open-Source
- [Buildjet CI Runners](/Products/Buildjet_CI_Runners) — Tool
- [Blacksmith CI Compute](/Products/Blacksmith_CI_Compute) — Tool

## Opportunity Win Conditions

**Kill Thresholds**:
- Average runner provisioning latency remains above 45 seconds after day 30
- Fewer than 40 percent of connected repositories actively route jobs by day 60
- Total trial-to-paid conversion rate drops below 15 percent at the 90-day mark
- Net compute savings fall below the $2,000 monthly subscription fee
**Leading Metrics**:
- Time to first successful routed build in minutes
- Percentage of CI minutes routed to spot instances
- Average provisioning latency per runner in seconds
- Compute cost reduction per completed pipeline block
- Rate of fallback to default cloud runners
**What Proves Right**: Engineering teams deploy the router and route over 60 percent of their continuous integration compute volume away from default runners to spot instances within the first 14 days. Monthly cohorts maintain 90 percent retention on a $2,000 per month base tier because their baseline cloud compute bills decrease by at least 40 percent. Developers complete pipelines without experiencing increased queue durations or dropped artifacts.
**What Proves Wrong**: Platform teams deploy the system but revert to default shared runners because instance provisioning delays add over 60 seconds to average build queues. Security operations block the deployment during the initial audit due to cross-environment network access requirements. The cloud cost overhead of running the router infrastructure exceeds the spot instance savings, resulting in immediate churn at the end of the trial period.

## Opportunity Build Profile

**Hardest Part**: Handling compute preemption and state transfer transparently so that spot instance interruptions do not cause false-negative build failures or disrupt developer workflows.
**Min Viable Scope**: Build a webhook-based orchestrator exclusively for GitHub Actions and AWS EC2 spot instances. Omit support for GitLab, Bitbucket, multi-cloud routing, and cross-node state caching, focusing entirely on stateless test runner provisioning.
**Cold Start Problem**: The dynamic routing engine requires historical build telemetry to accurately predict duration and peak memory usage for efficient bin-packing. Break this by launching with static, user-defined routing rules to accumulate execution data from early design partners before enabling predictive ML routing.
**Time To First Value**: 15 minutes to configure a custom runner webhook in GitHub Actions and execute the first build on optimized compute.
**Data Moat Available**: true
**Technical Difficulty**: High

## Neighborhood

### Where the gap lives

- [QA Engineers](/Occupations/QA_Engineers) — latent gap · Occupations

### Incumbent in

- [Gitlab Runner Chart](/Products/Gitlab_Runner_Chart) — incumbent in · Products
- [GitHub Hosted Runners](/Products/GitHub_Hosted_Runners) — incumbent in · Products
- [GitLab Shared Runners](/Products/GitLab_Shared_Runners) — incumbent in · Products
- [Actions Runner Controller](/Products/Actions_Runner_Controller) — incumbent in · Products
- [Blacksmith CI Compute](/Products/Blacksmith_CI_Compute) — incumbent in · Products
- [Buildjet CI Runners](/Products/Buildjet_CI_Runners) — incumbent in · Products

### Applies thesis

- [Enterprise Software Company](/CompanyTypes/Enterprise_Software_Company) — applies thesis · CompanyTypes

### Embodies

- [Software](/Theses/Software) — embodies · Theses

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