🔥An Intro to GitHub Actions + Terraform + AWS

This blog series focuses on presenting complex DevOps projects as simple and approachable via plain language and lots of pictures. You can do it.

GitHub, the ever-present cloud code storage tool, entered the CI/CD market in mid-2019. Their killer feature is that your code is probably already stored in GitHub, so why not have them manage automatic actions natively, rather than relying on other more complex methods like webhooks, or web scraping?

It’s not a terrible argument at all. Almost everyone in IT has heard of GitHub, and most have used it. It is extremely friendly to open source projects, and that friendliness continues with GitHub Actions — they are free to open source repositories.

Which is not to say that it’s expensive for private repos. Pricing is based around how many minutes are consumed per month, with a generous amount of minutes provided for free to hook new users, then a simple per-minute charged based on the instance type. And, as with other cloud CI/CD providers, the self-hosted option (where you spin up your own builder host) is 100% free.

In this blog we will:

• Create an IAM user in AWS with do-anything permissions
• Bootstrap AWS with an S3 bucket (for terraform storage) and a DynamoDB table for terraform state locking
• Set up a new GitHub repository
• Store the IAM key and secret key as encrypted keys in GitHub for Actions to consume
• Create some GitHub actions that execute automatic terraform plan when code is committed to our repository

Let’s get started. You can do this.

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🔥Let's Do DevOps: An Intro to GitHub Actions + Terraform + AWS