Don't repeat yourself - automate all the things

Drive increased productivity, reusability, and security by automating your DevOps pipelines.

DevOps is often described as the combination of people, processes and technologies to continuously deliver great products to customers. Central to a successful DevOps pipeline is automation, both to reduce the task burden for developers and increase reliability and accuracy. But setting up an environment which supports automation can, in and of itself, feel daunting. What's the best way to approach rolling out automation?

Jessica Dean, staff enterprise advocate, joined Christopher to walk through some best practices and features available in GitHub Actions to ensure a smooth DevOps process. She started by defining DevOps, and highlighting the importance of automation.

Software Engineer Brittany Ellich called in to discuss the GitHub Actions Marketplace, which is full of tools to help accelerate development of your own workflows. She also highlights attestations, allowing you to ensure you're running the Actions you trust, and only the Actions you trust.

As we begin to scale, we need to ensure we're centralizing as much work as possible, and of course doing it securely. Jessica highlights how we can create both reusable and required workflows. The former allows us to create a workflow once and reuse it across our entire organization, while the latter empowers us to enforce rules. So you can define a workflow for running tests and linters (for example) once, then apply it to all repositories of a particular type in your organization. And we can perform operations security using OIDC (OpenID Connect), which allows us to utilize temporary tokens instead of stored personal access tokens, which are effectively passwords.

Once we've created and configured our workflows we can turn our attention to ensuring they ran successfully and generating reports. As Jessica highlights, this can be done on individual workflows, or scale out to monitoring across a repository or an entire organization. This allows you to get an overview of what's taken place, and drill down to the specifics as needed, all while improving your DevOps implementation.

To learn more and continue your journey, explore the resources below:

Docs

Tools

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