There are dozens of CI/CD offerings and many are better designed than Github actions, including Gitlab's CI runners.

I don't see what paying Github would do for AWS or GCP. They both have their own code repos, build pipelines, container registries, and more. Even Azure has its own DevOps product.

I use Gitlab's CI runners and I agree. However, I am pretty excited about the direction that Github is going with their actions. Having a directory of user created actions and integrations seems like gold to me and I hope Gitlab starts leaning that way soon.

I agree, but GitHub must fix the security nightmare that is waiting to happen with GitHub actions marketplace. Seems like this would be such an easy fix, too.

Organizations can enforce that their repos use only actions that are within the repo, making the build more secure, controlled and auditable.

It's all about the ease of use. Manually setting up CI/CD is _hard_ and requires a team to maintain and support it. Whether through a home-rolled Jenkins deployment or Buildkite.

What is Actions?

Workflow automation w/ built in CI/CD, package management and code scanning etc.

The most important bit is workflow automation. It can be triggered on most (all?) events github emits

https://help.github.com/en/actions/reference/events-that-tri...

It was super obvious the value prop when it was HCL based. YAML based it kind of looks more like 'another CI'. It's still insanely powerful, just not as developer friendly anymore.

Continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) services. Essentially when you merge a changeset you can configure a specific branch to automatically test, package, deploy, and integration test that branch with no additional human intervention.

So Actions is similar to Jenkins?

minus the infrastructure, maintenance burden, and plugin hell

AWS has that.

that's just a subset of the features you can develop with actions