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December 11, 2025 18:24
GitHub announced major upgrades to its Actions platform that enhance performance and flexibility for developers. New features include YAML anchors and enhanced caching.
According to a recent announcement from GitHub Product Director Ben De St Paer-Gottch, GitHub announced a comprehensive overhaul of its Actions platform with a focus on performance, workflow flexibility, and reliability enhancements. This improvement is in response to significant platform growth and user demand for faster builds and better security.
Core architecture restructuring
In 2025 alone, developers will consume 11.5 billion minutes of GitHub Actions, a 35% increase from 2024. To accommodate this growth, GitHub has redesigned the core backend services that power the Actions platform. The initiative, which began in early 2024, has significantly increased the scalability and feature offering of the platform, which now supports 71 million jobs every day. This transformation improves uptime, resiliency, and performance while reducing internal throttling.
New features and improvements
One notable upgrade is the introduction of YAML anchors. This is a highly requested feature that reduces duplication by allowing developers to define settings once and reference them elsewhere in the workflow. Additionally, GitHub has released private workflow templates to increase the depth of reusable workflows and enable more modular and scalable CI/CD pipelines.
The platform now also supports large caches beyond the previous 10 GB limit, addressing a major pain point for projects with extensive dependencies. Additionally, the number of workflow dispatch inputs has been increased from 10 to 25, giving developers more flexibility when building automated workflows.
Future roadmap and community involvement
For 2026, GitHub plans to introduce time zone support for scheduled jobs and improved scheduling reliability, among other improvements based on community feedback. The company is actively seeking input from users to shape the future of GitHub Actions and encourages participation in community discussions to prioritize quality of life improvements.
These developments highlight GitHub’s commitment to improving the Actions platform and ensuring it meets the evolving needs of our developer community. For more information, see the official announcement on the GitHub blog.
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