Sarah introduced us to GitHub Actions right after it dropped about a year ago. Now they have improved the feature and are touting its CI/CD abilities. Run tests, do deployment, do whatever stuff computers do! It’s essentially a YAML file that says run this, then this, then this, etc., with configuration.
GitLab kinda paved the way on this particular feature, although you don’t get the machines for free on GitLab, nor does it seems like there is an ecosystem of tasks to build your actions workflow from.
It’s that ecosystem of tasks that I would think makes this especially interesting. “Democratizing DevOps,” if I’m feeling saucy. Karolina Szczur and Ben Schwarz’s new action to automatically optimize all images in a pull request showcases that. This makes it almost trivially easy to add to any Git(Hub)-based workflow and has huge obvious wins. Perhaps the future is peicing together our own pipelines from open-source efforts like this as needed.
Looks nice, eh?
