Provisioning Ephemeral Cloud Build Runners

Provisioning Ephemeral Cloud Build Runners with Terraform.

Experimented with on-demand Hetzner infrastructure to move expensive Next.js builds from a slow local machine to disposable cloud compute.

I was bored and I wanted to explore a simple question : Instead of permanently paying for powerful build infrastructure, could I provision compute only when I actually need it?

I built a Terraform-based workflow that provisions a temporary Hetzner machine on demand and uses it as a remote Next.js build environment.

Workflow : - Provision the remote runner with Terraform - Synchronize the project using rsync - Execute the production build remotely - Retrieve the generated artifact - Destroy the temporary infrastructure

For the experiment, this reduced a roughly 15-minute local build to around 3–4 minutes.

What I explored : - Infrastructure as Code - Disposable infrastructure - Remote build execution - Compute/cost trade-offs - Terraform and Hetzner Cloud

This is also a nice demonstration of how I approach infrastructure problems: measure the bottleneck, isolate the expensive workload and test whether infrastructure can remove the constraint.

Next time, I'll add Ansible atop.