// GitHub Actions

I've talked in the past about my Open Source journey, and some of the contributions that I have made in the community. In my current role, I've been leading on the global strategy for my team's DevOps practice, defining the areas of focus and initiatives that may be beneficial for the team. In this post, I'm going to talk through one of these initiatives, and how you can contribute towards the Azure GitHub Actions experience!

Serving static HTML, CSS, images, and JavaScript from a general-purpose web server wastes compute and money. The Static Content Hosting pattern offloads these assets to cloud storage—Azure Blob Storage, AWS S3, or GCP Storage—optionally fronted by a CDN for global performance and storage-tier scalability. This episode walks through the pattern, a real-world implementation with Hugo and Azure CDN, and the trade-offs to consider.

GitHub Issues provides a lightweight project backlog with labels, milestones, assignees, and kanban project boards, while GitHub Discussions (launched at GitHub Universe) enables open community conversations through categorised threads for Q&A, ideas, and show-and-tell. This episode demonstrates converting issues to discussions, automating workflows with GitHub Actions issue and project event triggers, and using project board automation rules.

In this episode, we're going to be taking a slight detour away from GitHub actions and focus on some of the announcements from GitHub universe last week. We're going to explore them both from the announcements, and also take a look at some of those features that have already been released. Stay tuned!

Before deploying application code, you need cloud infrastructure in place. This episode demonstrates how to deploy Azure infrastructure using ARM templates (Infrastructure as Code) directly from a GitHub Actions workflow—covering ARM template structure, the azure/arm-deploy action, repository organisation, and service principal setup for automated, repeatable Azure deployments.

You have your .NET Core application code and your Azure App Service infrastructure is ready. Now it's time to wire them together with an automated GitHub Actions deployment pipeline. This episode walks through building a multi-job workflow that compiles, publishes, and deploys your .NET Core app to Azure App Service using publish profiles and GitHub Secrets.

This series opener demonstrates source-controlling a .NET MVC project scaffolded with dotnet new mvc inside Windows Subsystem for Linux, using VS Code's built-in Git integration to stage commits, push to a new GitHub repository, and set a remote origin. It also introduces the GitHub Actions Azure Actions catalogue — including azure/login, azure/cli, and azure/webapps-deploy — as a foundation for the CI/CD automation covered in subsequent episodes.

New to GitHub Actions? This episode is your starting point. Chris walks through GitHub Actions workflow fundamentals—YAML syntax, jobs, steps, GitHub-hosted runners, and secrets management—then shows how to authenticate against Azure using the Azure Login action and a service principal, before running Azure CLI commands as part of your first automated pipeline.

Chris walks through GitHub Actions fundamentals and demonstrates how to use them to build and deploy a multi-tenant Azure Functions API and a static frontend — both triggered automatically on push and pull request events. Using a pet project (a Yu-Gi-Oh card inventory app) as the real-world example, the session covers CI/CD concepts, workflow triggers, GitHub Secrets, publish profiles, Dependabot, and the GitHub public roadmap for upcoming Actions features like manual deployment approvals.