GitHub Actions down? No problem. Green with Chainguard Checks.

Chainguard builds the images and packages the world patches with. Until this month, a lot of that traffic flowed through a repository where we relied heavily on GitHub Actions to automate our CI workflows. We migrated off GitHub Actions to Chainguard Checks, and it's paying dividends. This post covers how we used Chainguard Checks to take that repository off GitHub Actions. It also covers why we had to: the number of merges landing in that repository is growing exponentially as we continue to scale our agentic workflows. One of our busiest repositories now sees roughly 2,000 merges per day, up from about 500 earlier this year. One of our busiest repositories now sees roughly 2,000 merges per day, up from about 500 earlier this year. When GitHub Actions has a bad day, our automation did too. On August 6, 2026, Actions was degraded for 9 hours and 9 minutes, and at peak, 71% of workflow runs failed, according to GitHub's incident report. When GitHub Actions has a bad day, our automation did too. On August 6, 2026, Actions was degraded for 9 hours and 9 minutes, and at peak, 71% of workflow runs failed, according to GitHub's incident report. We…