Event-driven workflow automation in GitHub, started by things like a push or pull request. Typical uses include deploying Bicep or CLI templates and launching Azure Machine Learning jobs with no manual step.
Read more: Microsoft Learn
In the Ultra Transcenders books
Each book explains GitHub Actions in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.
Terms in this definition
- Workflow automation
Starts a Consumption logic app in Defender for Cloud whenever a recommendation, alert or regulatory compliance change meets your trigger conditions.
- LIKE
Compares strings with a pattern that can contain the % and _ wildcards. Because it only understands character patterns, searching big volumes of text this way is much slower than using full-text search.
- Real-time streaming semantic model
Covers live-fed push, streaming and PubNub models, plus streaming dashboard tiles. Microsoft now steers people towards Real-Time Intelligence in Fabric, as these are being retired and new ones can only be made until 31 October 2027.
- Pull request
In Azure Repos or GitHub, a proposal to merge one branch into another, at which point reviewers and branch policies or protection rules come into play.
- Bicep
Domain-specific language for declaring Azure infrastructure as code, which is compiled into ARM templates.
- Azure CLI
Command-line tool for managing Azure that runs on any platform; examples include
az login,az storage queueandaz policy state trigger-scan. - Azure Machine Learning
Azure platform where you train, deploy, monitor and retrain models of your own, practising MLOps through tools such as pipelines, online endpoints, model monitoring and prompt flow.
Related terms
- Actions Runner Controller
A Kubernetes operator maintained by GitHub and deployed with Helm. It manages and automatically scales self-hosted GitHub Actions runners inside your own clusters.
- CI/CD
Pipelines, for example in Azure Pipelines or GitHub Actions, that build, test and deploy code automatically; short for continuous integration and continuous delivery.
- Deployment Center
Where, in the App Service section of the portal, you configure the source deployments come from, such as Azure Repos, GitHub Actions or a container registry, together with container options and continuous deployment.
- Environment secrets
In GitHub Actions, secrets attached to a deployment environment, readable only by jobs that name it. They sit beside secrets set at repository and organisation level.
- Federated identity credential
Lets an outside workload, GitHub Actions or Kubernetes for instance, obtain an Entra token in exchange for its own token, so no secret has to be stored.
- GitHub Actions Importer
A GitHub CLI extension, run as gh actions-importer, for planning and carrying out a move to GitHub Actions from systems such as Azure Pipelines: it can audit, forecast, dry-run and migrate.
- GitHub-hosted runner
A new virtual machine, managed by GitHub, provided for each GitHub Actions job and chosen by a label such as ubuntu-latest. On GitHub Team and Enterprise Cloud, larger runners offer extra resources.
- JIT runner
Just-in-time self-hosted runner for GitHub Actions: made via the REST API, it takes one job and then disappears, as with --ephemeral. Handy for autoscaling and limits how long a compromise can persist.