Day Two Cloud 050: Nerding Out On GitHub Actions With Chris Wahl

Today’s episode gets into the nerdy details of how an infrastructure professional can use GitHub Actions. Actions is a recent feature introduced on GitHub that lets you chain together steps or instructions and trigger them to run as a workflow.
Actions lets you automate workflows in a GitHub repository without having to set up a sidecar service to monitor for triggers. For example, you could set up Actions to take specific steps if someone makes a pull request or submits an issue.
Our guest is Chris Wahl, Chief Technologist at Rubrik and co-host of the Datanauts podcast (now discontinued, but see the back catalog here).
We discuss:

* What GitHub Actions are and how they work
* The marketplace for Actions
* How to set up Actions
* Addressing security
* Tips for effective use
* Documentation
* More

Takeaways:

* The GitHub Learning Lab action on the marketplace is a fun way to get started.

* Workshop 1: GitHub Actions: Continuous Integration
* Workshop 2a: GitHub Actions: Continuous Delivery with AWS
* Workshop 2b: GitHub Actions: Continuous Delivery with Azure


* This video is great, too. Advanced GitHub Actions: workflows for production grade CI/CD – GitHub Universe 2019
* Anytime you need to work with sensitive information, such as a key, password, or account, store it in a GitHub secret. Don’t write it down in any of your code or configuration files.
* Start with a private repo on GitHub that has fresh data that you can manipulate via Actions without having to worry about torching any of your existing infrastructure or workflows. Spend time getting to know Actions and make your mistakes in a test scenario, first, before rolling out to production.

Show Links:
Debugging with tmate · Actions – GitHub Marketplace
Workflow syntax for GitHub Actions – GitHub Actions
Chris Wahl on Twitter
Wahlnetwork.com – Chris’s blog
Chris Wahl on GitHub
Chris Wahl on LinkedIn