5Secure and Optimize Automation
- 5.1Security Best Practices
Understand mitigating script injection, the GITHUB_TOKEN lifecycle and least privilege vs PATs, OIDC for cloud federation (eliminating long-lived secrets), pinning third-party actions to SHAs and choosing trustworthy actions with usage policies, artifact attestations/provenance, and environment approval gates.
- 5.2Optimizing Performance and Cost
Understand efficiency via caching and artifact retention, applying retention policies via REST APIs, and strategies for scaling and cost-optimizing workflows—concurrency, matrix size, concurrency groups, runner selection, conditionals, and path/branch filters.

