GitHub Actions are worth it?

[@logeshkumarrajkumar861]

Wow that was lot of useful and practical knowledge on CI/CD in 10 minutes. Thanks a lot 🙏

[@perotubinger]

There is a difference between automating a deployment and have it deployed automatically. You should always automate. Having your CI deploy automatically is great in most cases. But there are some downsides to this which are often ignored. Having your build and deployment buried in some CI configuration makes something magic that some developers will never take ownership for. Oftentimes you hear developers say: The workflow broke and I couldn’t deploy. And they throw their hands in the air. It is hard to develop and debug CI pipelines. What we do instead is having a deployment process that runs directly from your shell. We then _can_ use it in a CI deploy workflow (we often do), but we do it manually for some projects.

[@chrisbiscardi]

If a developer is saying "the workflow broke and I couldn't deploy" I'm not sure I *want* them manually deploying from their computer. Having automations/custom CLI tools that can run in multiple environments is a great idea though!

[@perotubinger]

@@chrisbiscardi That's not what I meant. I meant that using a scripted deployment that could also run on a dev machine _encourages_ developers to take ownership of the deployment process. If you can use it to update your dev/staging system right away you are more likely to understand it, enhance or fix it. That's what we saw at least. For simple projects and deployments all of that might not be a problem, besides that it is really slow and tedious to develop and debug a CI pipeline. In short: All you say is totally true, I just wanted to add that a CI pipeline feels foreign to some/many devs in larger projects. And it's very important that every system (dev/staging/production) behaves as much the same as possible so that problems do not creep in at the last stage (deployment to production).

[@perotubinger]

To be more clear: No, of course _nobody_ should deploy if something that they don't understand broke. 🙂

[@alexjmohr]

Thanks for this! Do you know of any tooling that could help with automating self-hosted bare metal deployments?

[@chrisbiscardi]

Depends on what part you're thinking of. Basic ideas are the same. Ex: if you're building OS images build them in CI and put them somewhere before you roll them out. I'd be looking at ansible or something like that for setup. but if you're asking if you can automate someone physically racking a server for you... unfortunately no 😀

[@theodorealenas3171]

My head hurts because I haven't worked in an industry yet, but I'm in awe. I want to get good at these concepts. I reinvented CD for handing my project to the professor on a platform where you can upload your project multiple times. I'm noticing though that I did it inefficiently: apparently I'm meant to run tests as I'm zipping the files, and find a way to automate the uploading at all costs. I skipped the part of atomatic uploads because it's not intuitive, you're meant to click a button on a webpage. I plan on dry running my collection of shell scripts inside a docker container with an empty mimicry of /usr/bin (is that a legit way to do it?) and apparently if I want these super quick tests I had when coding in C, I should find a way to keep the docker image up to date in a minimal way. I wish I could reliably modify the container on the fly, and somehow have the image keep up, but CI/CD people don't seem to lean on such premises. So it's probably too painful to do.

[@lowflyingdonut]

It's a lot of concepts to bite off at once.

[@ZekeFast]

I think in this particular video sound is a bit too refined with too much distortion going on... May be you need to put mic a bit further or use a bit less noise reduction. Great videos over all! Thank you a lot! Always fun and useful to watch!

[@chrisbiscardi]

Thanks for watching! I'll take a look at the audio chain and see what I can do. I'm no audio engineer so I still change things every video trying to learn a bit more about it.

[@z0OZ00OOO]

Thank you this is great 👍

[@animanaut]

looking into the very same topics rn 😂

[@chrisbiscardi]

nice! what are you ending up with?

[@animanaut]

@@chrisbiscardi a rocket based microserice . currently looking into gitlab pipelines and github actions. got as far as building a container, next steps are deployment and ... stuff