Introduction

Have you ever been part of a project that required the completion of routine, monotonous tasks? Have you ever sat down to release software and read over the project wiki page, only to find 15 manual steps that we needed to cut, paste, and pray? What did it feel like when it was your turn to complete those tasks?

Tasks such as these are referred to as toil – slow and difficult. This kind of work reduces our teams' development velocity and, just as critically, grinds away the morale of the DevOps or Site-Reliability Engineering (SRE) team over time. Toilsome tasks are manual, and by their nature, manual tasks are error-prone. If we don't try to replace these tasks with appropriate automation, more will accumulate, worsening the situation.

DevOps engineers are the anti-entropy force driving automation and reducing toilsome work. In this section, we will learn how to use GitHub Actions to automate workflows to reduce toil and increase project velocity.