Celilo builds and tests itself on its own hardware — a self-hosted CI runner rather than a rented cloud fleet. That’s the right call for a project about owning your own infrastructure, but real hardware behaves differently from a fast developer laptop: slower disks, a modest network uplink, and reboots that don’t always come back clean. Builder Hardening is the work to make that self-hosted pipeline dependably green.
Why real hardware is the point
Running CI on the same kind of machine an operator would actually own keeps Celilo honest about performance and resource limits. But it also surfaces timing that a cloud runner would paper over — a test that assumed near-instant disk or network can flake when those take real time. Rather than mask those with longer timeouts, the aim is to fix the underlying assumptions so the pipeline is a true signal.
The shape of the work
A handful of heavy tests are temporarily quarantined while the builder is made sturdier — faster storage behavior, a more capable network path, and surviving reboots without manual repair. As those environmental rough edges are smoothed, the quarantined tests come back into the everyday suite. The end state is a self-hosted pipeline that’s boring: it just works, every run.