GitHub Actions – Transforming Git services into a DevOps workflow pipeline

GitHub Actions are an exemplar feature that define the link between Git and DevOps.

As this ZDNet article explains:

With GitHub Actions, which can be written in YAML, you can build a container app, deploy a web service, publish packages to registries, or automate welcoming new programmers to your open source projects. Or chain them all together.

“So what is GitHub Actions exactly?

It’s an application programming interface (API) for cause and effect on GitHub. It enables you to orchestrate any workflow, based on any event, while GitHub manages the execution, provides you rich feedback and secures every step along the way. With GitHub Actions, workflows and steps are code in a repository, so you can create, share, reuse, and fork your software development practices. 

What’s new is that GitHub has added CI/CD and testing to Actions. With this, users can automate how they build, test, and deploy projects. You can do this with any platform. That includes Linux, MacOS, and Windows. You can then run your workflows in a container or on a virtual machine (VM). “

How to put GitHub Actions to work for your software team

TechBeacon provides this concise and insightful action plan for How to put GitHub Actions to work for your software team.

“With advanced, complex workflows reduced to simple commands, Action-based workflows can offer impressive benefits to ops developers. You can use GitHub Actions to automate repetitive actions and decrease time spent configuring workflows, giving you more free time to focus on your own domain logic.

Instead of maintaining a sea external DevOps apps and accounts, GitHub Actions is automating software delivery using Git. Teams can embrace a collection of UNIX-like microservices to perform niche tasks, all called in sequence with their custom, event-driven pipeline. Since Actions are defined in your repository or public repositories, executions are handled by a kind of mesh of GitHub repos.”