It can be challenging too understand the differences between Azure DevOps and GitHub Actions. Sometimes, what you really need is a mapping of the features and terminology. Perhaps something annotated with how to support features that don’t have a direct equivalent. Perhaps something like this …

I’ve seen lots of teams trying to increase the availability of GitHub runners for their organization by implementing GitHub Actions Runner Controller (ARC). In some cases, they hope to try to exceed GitHub’s 99.9% SLA. Unfortunately, the math works against them. In this post, I’ll explain why.

One challenge with the GitHub’s Actions Runner Controller (ARC) is that it does not officially support Windows containers for the runners. With a little bit of work, though, it’s possible to make this configuration work on a hybrid Linux/Windows cluster.

Creating a well-organized build or release workflow is both an art and a science. Done properly, the process can be testable and maintainable, able to work on any CI/CD system. Like many things in software, there’s even a pattern that helps!

It’s not unusual for teams to want to merge the same branch into multiple branches. If they create multiple pull requests from that branch to each of the other branches, they suddenly find that their Checks behave differently than expected and the branches start to share results. Understanding why this happens makes it easy to get Checks to behave as expected.