Feature Request: Support Agentless Jobs in GitHub Actions

[RehabAbotalep]

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We've been actively using GitHub Actions and appreciate its seamless integration into our workflows. However, we've encountered a limitation where every job requires a runner, even when the task does not involve compute-heavy operations. In Azure DevOps, we utilize agentless jobs (via pool: server) for lightweight orchestration tasks, approvals, and external API calls—without consuming a runner.

Current Limitations:

• No way to define a job in GitHub Actions that runs without a runner.
• All jobs, even those performing trivial tasks (like calling a webhook), must allocate a GitHub-hosted or self-hosted runner.
• Cannot implement lightweight orchestration workflows without incurring unnecessary runner usage.

Why This Matters:

Having agentless job support would benefit teams by:

• Reducing cost and resource usage for trivial tasks.
• Enabling cleaner orchestration and control flow (e.g., delays, approvals, or external service triggers).
• Aligning with practices used in other systems like Azure Pipelines.

Real Use Case:

Automatically Close Sub-Issues When Parent Is Closed
Currently, GitHub doesn’t support cascading issue closures natively.
We've implemented a workflow that:

• Detects when a parent issue is closed.
• Finds and closes linked child issues using the GitHub API.

This trivial automation still requires spinning up a runner just to send API calls, resulting in unnecessary compute overhead and cost.

Feature Request:

We would like to propose the following enhancements:

1. Support for agentless jobs that run without a runner (for example, for calling external APIs or triggering downstream workflows).
2. Lightweight orchestration steps that don't require allocation of a runner VM.
3. Syntax support for something equivalent to pool: server (as in Azure Pipelines) in GitHub Actions.

This would significantly improve flexibility and efficiency for automation workflows within GitHub Actions.

Thank you!

[MohamedRadwan-DevOps]

This is really important! Thanks for raising this!!

[RehabAbotalep]

This is one of the real workflows that motivated this request.

I built a small custom GitHub Action to automatically close sub-issues when a parent issue is closed: Close Sub-Issues Automatically

The logic itself is just GitHub API calls, but it still requires spinning up a runner.
This is exactly the kind of lightweight orchestration that would benefit from agentless jobs.