GitHub Actions gets a new backend and a wave of long-awaited fixes

GitHub Actions usage has climbed sharply over the past year: developers consumed 11.5 billion Actions minutes across public and open source projects in 2025, a 35% jump from the year before. That growth forced GitHub to rethink the backend services that run every job and runner, and that architectural overhaul is now complete. The new platform handles about 71 million jobs per day—more than triple the roughly 23 million per day when the rebuild began in early 2024—and it unlocks several capabilities the community had been requesting for years.

Why GitHub rebuilt the Actions backend

The old architecture could not keep pace with month-over-month growth. GitHub set out to improve uptime and resilience, cut internal throttles, and scale to roughly 10 times existing usage. The effort consumed a large portion of the team's focus and delayed feature work, but individual enterprises can now start seven times more jobs per minute than before. Since August, every GitHub Actions job has run on the new system.

With that foundation in place, GitHub has started shipping a batch of quality-of-life updates that address some of the most popular community requests.

What shipped in late 2025

YAML anchors for less duplication

Workflows can now use YAML anchors, one of the most requested features across the runners and community repositories. Anchors (&) define a block once and aliases (*) reference it elsewhere, so environment variables, step configurations, or entire job setups can be maintained centrally instead of repeated across jobs.

Non-public workflow templates

Organizations can now store workflow templates in a private or internal .github repository. Teams get a consistent starting point for new workflows without manually copying CI patterns across repos.

Deeper reusable workflows

Limits for reusable workflows have been raised to support 10 levels of nesting and 50 workflow calls per run. That gives larger teams more room to split automation into modular, shareable pieces.

Caches larger than 10GB

The per-repository cache limit is gone. Previously, hitting the 10GB ceiling meant evicting build dependencies before they could speed up the next run, forcing repeated downloads. The higher limit matters especially for dependency-heavy builds and multi-language monorepos.

More workflow_dispatch inputs

Manually triggered workflows now accept up to 25 inputs, up from 10. That gives developers more room to build parameterized deployments, test configurations, and other self-service automation.

Platform and infrastructure progress

Other 2025 releases include arm64-hosted runners for public repositories, macOS 15 and Windows 2025 images, generally available Actions Performance Metrics, and custom images for GitHub-hosted runners in public preview.

Roadmap for early 2026

GitHub has a shorter list of items planned for the first quarter of 2026, driven by community discussions:

  • Time zone support for scheduled jobs, plus work on schedule reliability.
  • Returning the run ID from workflow_dispatch.
  • A conditional operator or function for expressions.
  • UX improvements: faster page loads, better rendering for workflows with over 300 jobs, and a jobs list filter.

GitHub also plans to begin work on running steps in parallel, one of the most frequently requested features, targeting a release before mid-2026.

How to shape what comes next

The Actions team is asking users to keep voting on the most important items in the community discussions and to join a dedicated discussion post where product and engineering leads will talk through the 2026 plan directly.