Introducing GitHub Actions

So, what is GitHub Actions? GitHub Actions is an automation platform that allows developers to create workflows to automate software development tasks, which in our case, means managing and deploying our IaC workloads.

The beta of GitHub Actions was first launched in mid-2019. The initial release of GitHub Actions allowed a select number of developers to create and share actions that could be used to automate repetitive tasks in their development workflow. It was launched as a competitor to other popular automation platforms such as Jenkins, Travis CI, and CircleCI.

GitHub Actions is based on several concepts, and the ones which will be covered in detail in this chapter are the following:

• Workflows: These are a series of tasks that are automated using GitHub Actions. Workflows are defined in YAML files that are stored in the repository. Workflows can be triggered by various events, such as pushing code to the repository, creating a pull request...