🤖 Automation & Operations
How we automate the entire data pipeline using GitHub Actions, ensuring reliable, production-ready operations with zero manual intervention.
🔄 Automation Overview
The complete automation strategy that makes our data pipeline production-ready
Why Automate?
Manual data processing is error-prone, time-consuming, and doesn't scale. Our automation strategy ensures:
- Reliability: Consistent execution regardless of human availability
- Scalability: Handle increasing data volumes without additional effort
- Auditability: Complete traceability of all data transformations
- Efficiency: Focus human effort on analysis, not data wrangling
- Compliance: Meet regulatory requirements for data lineage
Automation Architecture
⏰
Scheduled Triggers
Weekly automated runs
🔍
Data Validation
Quality checks & alerts
📊
Dashboard Updates
Real-time refresh
📧
Notifications
Success/failure alerts
⚙️ GitHub Actions Workflow
The CI/CD pipeline that orchestrates our entire data processing workflow
Workflow Overview
Our GitHub Actions workflow runs every Monday at 6:00 AM CT (11:00 UTC) to refresh the Chicago SMB Market Radar with the latest data.
name: Chicago SMB Market Radar - Weekly Update
on:
schedule:
# Every Monday at 11:00 UTC (6:00 AM CT)
- cron: '0 11 * * MON'
workflow_dispatch: # Allow manual triggers
jobs:
update-data:
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- name: Checkout code
uses: actions/checkout@v4
- name: Set up Python
uses: actions/setup-python@v4
with:
python-version: '3.11'
- name: Install dependencies
run: |
pip install -r requirements.txt
- name: Run data pipeline
env:
SHEETS_CREDS: ${{ secrets.SHEETS_CREDS }}
SHEET_ID: ${{ secrets.SHEET_ID }}
run: python -m src.main
- name: Validate results
run: python -m src.validation
- name: Update dashboard
run: python -m src.dashboard_refreshKey Workflow Features
🕐 Scheduling
- • Weekly automated execution
- • Manual trigger capability
- • Timezone-aware scheduling
- • Holiday and weekend handling
🔐 Security
- • Encrypted secrets storage
- • Service account credentials
- • Minimal permission scope
- • Audit trail logging
Ready for the Final Chapter?
Now that we've automated our pipeline, let's see the results and business impact of the Chicago SMB Market Radar.