GitHub Actions Tutorial: AWS & Azure Infrastructure Deployment

Cloud teams that deploy to AWS and Azure by hand, or through pipelines built on long-lived static keys, carry avoidable risk: inconsistent server configs, unreviewed production changes, and idle resources that drive up cloud spend. This course shows IT teams how to replace that with repeatable GitHub Actions workflows.

Role fit: Built for IT Practitioners with at least a year of experience, including developers, cloud engineers, and DevOps engineers. The instructor recommends basic GitHub Actions familiarity first, so Team Leads may want to pair it with a foundational GitHub Actions course.

Time investment: About 9 hours across 9 self-contained skills. Each skill builds a working solution from an empty repository, so learners can take only the modules that match your stack, such as CloudFormation, Terraform, Ansible for EC2, S3 replication, or Azure Container Instances.

Risk and governance: Learners compare static credentials with OpenID Connect federation and scope trust to specific repositories. They also see why an unreviewed Terraform apply can hit production, and how to reach private VPC resources without exposing them publicly.

Change management: Workflows trigger on code pushes, so teams adopt a shared, reviewable deployment model instead of individual console changes.

IT Directors and Training Managers can use Playlists to sequence prerequisites with this course, and Team Reporting to track progress across the team.

IT teams use this training to replace manual, error-prone cloud changes with repeatable GitHub Actions workflows across AWS and Microsoft Azure. Instructor Trevor Sullivan builds each solution from an empty repository, so your team sees every integration step, including the gotchas that come up along the way.

• Safer cloud authentication: Engineers connect GitHub Actions to AWS and Azure using either static credentials or OpenID Connect. With OIDC, trust-relationship conditions can limit access to a specific repository and audience, which reduces the need to store long-lived secrets in repositories.
• Controlled infrastructure changes: Teams deploy CloudFormation stacks and Terraform templates through workflows. That lets multiple engineers collaborate on one stack file. Your team also learns why an unchecked terraform apply is risky against business-critical production accounts, and how failed stack updates can leave resources in a rollback state.
• Consistent server configuration and lower cloud waste: Workflows trigger Ansible to keep packages and config files consistent across EC2 fleets that span regions and VPCs. Automated account cleanup targets the costs that build up in AWS accounts over time.
• Secure private-network access and data automation: ZeroTier gives CI/CD runners access to private VPC resources, such as an RDS database, without public exposure. S3 data replication with Rclone extends the same automation approach to data migrations.

Knowledge

• How GitHub Actions authenticates to AWS with static credentials or an OpenID Connect (OIDC) provider, including IAM role trust relationships and conditions that limit access by audience and repository
• How GitHub Actions connects to Microsoft Azure through an app registration using either OpenID integration or static credentials
• Why Terraform apply and CloudFormation stack updates make real changes to production resources, and how failed CloudFormation updates can leave a stack in a rollback state that needs handling
• How workflow jobs and steps run in sequence or in parallel, and how run steps call shell scripts with a configurable shell
• How a ZeroTier network gives a CI/CD runner private access to VPC resources, such as Amazon RDS, that are blocked from public access
• How GitHub Actions can deploy changes to Azure container-based workloads after authentication is configured

Ability

• Build a workflow from an empty repository that deploys AWS CloudFormation stack changes automatically, so the team can work together on one stack file
• Run Terraform init, plan, and apply from GitHub Actions and manage state as templates change
• Automate AWS account cleanup to keep unused resources from adding to cloud costs
• Copy data from Amazon S3 to S3-compatible storage providers using Rclone with configured source and destination remotes
• Trigger Ansible from GitHub Actions to apply the same packages and configuration files across EC2 instances
• Publish container images and redeploy Azure container-based workloads automatically when code changes are pushed