Book Image

Mastering GitHub Actions

By : Eric Chapman
Book Image

Mastering GitHub Actions

By: Eric Chapman

Overview of this book

Navigating GitHub Actions often leaves developers grappling with inefficiencies and collaboration bottlenecks. Mastering GitHub Actions offers solutions to these challenges, ensuring smoother software development. With 16 extensive chapters, this book simplifies GitHub Actions, walking you through its vast capabilities, from team and enterprise features to organization defaults, self-hosted runners, and monitoring tools. You’ll learn how to craft reusable workflows, design bespoke templates, publish actions, incorporate external services, and introduce enhanced security measures. Through hands-on examples, you’ll gain best-practice insights for team-based GitHub Actions workflows and discover strategies for maximizing organization accounts. Whether you’re a software engineer or a DevOps guru, by the end of this book, you'll be adept at amplifying productivity and leveraging automation's might to refine your development process.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Part 1:Centralized Workflows to Assist with Governance
7
Part 2: Implementing Advanced Patterns within Actions
14
Part 3: Best Practices, Patterns, Tricks, and Tips Toolkit

Managing GitHub costs

What we have covered so far for action-based cost spending throughout the book was around optimizing the workflows to reduce action spend. But we have not covered yet how to measure or alert when we’re getting close to exceeding our budgets or how to identify slow actions.

Datadog has capabilities here by capturing and visualizing our workflows, but that’s not ideally what it’s there for. In this section, we’ll focus on some alternatives in the marketplace that provide a good overview of where your minutes are spent across all the runners. We’ll then extend it so that we can also have this reported to us via communication tools such as Slack in a FinOps channel.

Let’s first dive into what we can do natively in GitHub.

GitHub spending limits

Managing costs effectively is a key element in the administration of any software development endeavor. As GitHub Actions become more prevalent in CI/CD processes, grasping...