Moving To GitHub Actions

How I'm Spending My Free Time At Ignite 2019

by JamesQMurphy | November 5, 2019

I didn't mention this, but I'm at Microsoft Ignite 2019 this year. I was hoping to have this site a little more feature-complete by the time Ignite rolled around; specifically, I wanted login and comments done. But day jobs are day jobs for a reason, so unfortunately, a fully-functional blog will have to wait just a little bit longer.

I also thought that there wouldn't be anything relevant at Ignite to talk about -- after all, this blog is hosted on AWS, not Azure. But of course, I was wrong. I totally forgot that Microsoft powers not only the build pipeline, but the source code repository as well. And then... I learned about GitHub Actions.

Lights, Camera, GitHub Actions!

I attended the Ignite Session "Empowering every developer to innovate with Microsoft Azure". And as expected, it included some previews of new features of Visual Studio (like IntelliCode). And it was hosted by Microsoft legend Donovan Brown:

Donovan Brown speaking at Microsoft Ignite 2019

And even though he longer does DevOps¹, his session still included a very DevOps-y segment that described the newest thing for GitHub: GitHub Actions. Here's a few shots of Abel Wang, who seems even more excited about DevOps than Donovan (if that's even possible), giving the actual presentation of GitHub Actions:

Abel Wang demonstrating GitHub Actions at Microsoft Ignite 2019

Essentially, the GitHub Actions feature seems to be Azure Pipelines baked right into GitHub. It's still in beta, which means I had to sign up for it. So I did:

GitHub Actions Activated

Challenge Accepted

I've challenged myself to switch over the build and release pipelines over to GitHub actions -- this week! And I was so excited, I tweeted that I would do it. Now I have to make it happen!

Looking Forward

From a long term perspective, I'm curious about the future of GitHub as it pertains to Azure DevOps. Several speakers have described the GitHub community as "40 million collaborators to work with", so perhaps Microsoft intends to keep GitHub for open source projects, and Azure DevOps for private industry. We shall see.

His own words. Donovan Brown's title is now "Principal Cloud Advocate". He even quipped that it was odd watching somebody else demonstrate something DevOps related, but that he had in fact, "passed the torch."↩