GitHub Actions: How a Core Overhaul and Community Feedback Drive the Future

GitHub Actions’ rapid growth since its 2018 launch has transformed it into an essential tool for developers worldwide. In 2025 alone, usage soared to 11.5 billion minutes for public and open source projects, a 35% jump from the previous year. 

This surge exposed new challenges and underscored the importance of performance, reliability, and user experience. Today, GitHub Actions orchestrates over 71 million jobs daily, a testament to its central role in modern development pipelines and GitHub’s commitment to continuous improvement.

Re-architecting for Reliability and Scale

By early 2024, the original infrastructure behind GitHub Actions was being stretched to its limits, supporting 23 million jobs each day but struggling with scalability and reliability. Recognizing the need for a sustainable foundation, GitHub’s engineering team embarked on a major backend overhaul focused on:

• Improved uptime and resilience for mission-critical workflows
• Enhanced performance and fewer bottlenecks
• Greater scalability, aiming for a tenfold increase in capacity

This transformation, while temporarily slowing down the delivery of new features, paved the way for significant benefits. With the re-architected system now live, enterprises can launch jobs at speeds up to seven times faster than before, opening doors for more ambitious automation and CI/CD strategies.

Delivering Long-Awaited Community Features

With the infrastructure upgrade complete, focus shifted back to innovation and addressing user feedback. Notable feature rollouts in 2025 included:

• YAML Anchors: Allowing teams to avoid repetitive configuration and keep large workflows organized
  
  
• Non-Public Workflow Templates: Giving organizations the ability to create and reuse private templates for standardized CI
  
  
• Deeper Reusable Workflow Nesting: Supporting up to 10 nesting levels and 50 calls per run for modular pipelines
  
  
• Larger Caches: Raising the cache size limit above 10GB for projects with complex dependencies
  
  
• More Dispatch Inputs: Expanding from 10 to 25 input fields for richer, customizable workflows
  
  
• Platform and Performance Upgrades: Including ARM64-hosted runners, updated OS images, detailed performance metrics, and custom image support for diverse project requirements

These enhancements directly address long-standing community pain points, helping developers streamline their workflows and scale with confidence.

Looking Ahead: What’s Next for GitHub Actions

The roadmap for early 2026 is shaped by ongoing developer feedback and evolving needs. Key features in the pipeline include:

• Timezone support and more reliable job scheduling
• Run ID returns for better automation and tracking
• A case function for expressions to enable sophisticated conditional logic
• The highly anticipated parallel steps feature, targeting mid-2026 for release
• UX improvements such as faster page loads and better workflow rendering, even for repositories with hundreds of jobs

GitHub also emphasizes a commitment to transparency and a user-driven approach, ensuring that future updates reflect the real-world needs of its developer community.

Community Involvement: Shaping the Future

Developers remain at the heart of GitHub Actions’ evolution. The platform encourages active participation through:

• Engagement in community discussions
• Joining roadmap threads with product and engineering leads
• Staying informed via the GitHub Actions changelog

This collaborative spirit ensures that GitHub Actions continues to deliver features and improvements that matter most, powering the builds, tests, and deployments that shape modern software.

Conclusion

By investing in its core infrastructure and prioritizing community feedback, GitHub Actions has set new standards for scalability and developer empowerment. As the roadmap unfolds into 2026 and beyond, developers are invited to engage, share insights, and help shape the future of this indispensable automation platform.

Source: Let’s talk about GitHub Actions - The GitHub Blog by Ben De St Paer-Gotch