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Runner Pools

A runner pool is a named, capability-tagged group of runners that pulls jobs from Roboticks. Every test job carries a set of requirements — ROS distro, simulator, GPU, network posture — and the job_router dispatches it to the pool that fits. There are two pool types. Same wire contract, same job payload, different fulfillment.

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Hosted pool catalog

Spot interruption is handled by the platform — interrupted jobs requeue automatically. See Pricing for the canonical rate card.

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Self-hosted pool model

You declare a pool in the dashboard or via rbtk pool create, mint a registration token, then run rbtk-runner register on each machine that should join. The runner polls /internal/runners/poll, declares its capabilities (ROS distros installed, sim engines available, GPU model, max concurrent jobs), and heartbeats every 15 seconds with token rotation.

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Routing rules

The job_router resolves each job against pool capabilities in this order:

1. project.airgapped == true — only self-hosted pools in the project’s namespace are considered. Hosted pools are excluded even if they match capabilities.
2. requires_sim + self-hosted GPU capacity available — prefer the self-hosted pool (free of compute).
3. requires_sim + no self-hosted GPU capacity — fall back to a hosted GPU pool. Pre-MVP customers can require explicit opt-in via project.hosted_fallback = true.
4. Plain ROS2 test (no simulator) — load-balance: try self-hosted first, then hosted. The router prefers warm runners over cold-start hosted Fargate tasks.

Capabilities are matched all-or-nothing: a job needing ros: humble and sim: gazebo-harmonic will skip a runner that only declares ros: iron.

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How Roboticks differs from GitHub-Actions self-hosted runners

You may already know the GitHub self-hosted runner. roboticks-runner is purpose-built for the V&V loop:

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Why a pool, not just a runner

Pools let you declare policy at one level and let many machines fulfill it:

• A single prod-gpu-farm pool can have 12 machines, each declaring its GPU model. The router fans out across all of them.
• Quotas and concurrency caps live on the pool, not the runner.
• Air-gapped, network-isolated, and license-restricted (e.g., LDRA-licensed-host) jobs share one routing primitive.

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Next steps