Terrill Dickey
December 11, 2025 18:24
GitHub has announced a major upgrade to its Actions platform, improving performance and flexibility for developers. New features include YAML anchors and expanded caching.
GitHub has unveiled a comprehensive overhaul of its Actions platform, focusing on improving performance, workflow flexibility, and stability, according to a recent announcement from GitHub’s Director of Product, Ben De St Paer-Gotch. The improvements are a response to the platform’s tremendous growth and user demand for faster builds and better security.
Rebuild core architecture
In 2025 alone, developers will utilize 11.5 billion GitHub Actions minutes, a 35% increase from 2024. To accommodate this growth, GitHub has redesigned the core backend services that support the Actions platform. This effort, launched in early 2024, has significantly improved the scalability and feature delivery of the platform, which now supports 71 million jobs per day. These changes reduce internal limitations while improving uptime, resiliency, and performance.
New features and improvements
Among the notable upgrades is the introduction of YAML anchors, a feature that reduces duplication by allowing developers to define settings once and reference them elsewhere in the workflow. GitHub is also releasing private workflow templates and increasing the depth of reusable workflows, allowing for more modular and scalable CI/CD pipelines.
Additionally, the platform now supports larger caches beyond the previous 10GB limit, solving a major pain point for projects with extensive dependencies. Additionally, the number of workflow dispatch inputs increases from 10 to 25, giving developers greater flexibility in building automation workflows.
Future roadmap and community engagement
Looking ahead to 2026, GitHub plans to introduce support for time zones for scheduled tasks, improved schedule stability, and other improvements based on community feedback. The company is actively seeking user input to shape the future of GitHub Actions, and encourages participation in community discussions to prioritize improving quality of life.
These developments highlight GitHub’s commitment to improving the Actions platform to meet the evolving needs of the developer community. For more information, please refer to the official announcement on the GitHub blog.
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