How Workflow Reuse Solves the DevEx Gap
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Reinventing the Wheel is Wasted Effort
October 9, 2025
Every company wants to move faster, but the bigger the engineering organization, the more friction you find between good intentions and reality. The irony is that most of the blockers aren't about infrastructure or talent. The core of the issue centers on how to reuse existing IT assets within the organization in a secure way.
Every engineering team automates workflows: CI/CD pipelines, deployments, compliance checks, provisioning, and more. However, almost none of the automations are designed to be reused. For example, authentication credentials are often hard-coded, environment configurations are inflexible, documentation is sparse, and the engineer tasked to build the pipeline doesn't understand the security, compliance, and governance rules that apply to the code.
In the best case scenario, when another team needs to use an existing automation, they copy, paste, and tweak it to fit their needs. Unfortunately this happens at scale until there are 10+ slightly different versions of the same process. In the worst case, they'll rebuild the automation from scratch wasting precious engineering effort.
Over time, this sprawl becomes technical debt that affects the entire organization. A change in one policy, such as the base configuration for cloud VMs, can impact hundreds or thousands of automations. This can take months to fully implement and at the end, nobody actually knows the "right way" to do things because of the duplicative automation.
Implementing Automation Reuse as a First-class Concept
Within the GitHub ecosystem, there are a few primitives that help organizations reuse their automations:
- GitHub Actions: self-contained automation modules that accomplish a discrete task
- Run Step: an executable shell script
- GitHub Actions Workflows: a collection of 1 or more GitHub Actions and/or Run Steps with a scope local to a single GitHub Repository
- GitHub Actions Reusable Workflow: a collection of 1 or more GitHub Actions and/or Run Steps designed to be callable by other workflows in any GitHub Repository in your organization
In addition to these primitives, you need to enable discoverability and compliance to truly reuse automations within your GitHub environment
Discoverability
Developers need the ability to find reusable automations. GitHub has an Actions marketplace that allows users to discover the GitHub Actions. However it is a public marketplace so anyone can publish an Action. Most organizations have rules/policies regarding which GitHub Actions can be used.
In addition, developers can create their own GitHub Actions to accomplish tasks, such as authenticating with a service. If those GitHub Actions are not published to the public GitHub marketplace (they typically aren't), then other developers within your organization have no way to actually find them.
Finally, we need to talk about Reusable Workflows. There is no marketplace for Reusable Workflows in the GitHub ecosystem. That means as a developer, you either know which Reusable Workflow you're supposed to use, or you don't. Discovering what's out there is incredibly difficult so even if your organization spends a ton of time creating and maintaining them, good luck getting thousands of developers to find them.
Compliance
The other key challenge is workflow compliance. In particular, as a developer, how do know if a specific Reusable Workflow meets corporate security and compliance standards? Most developers are not compliance experts. If you give a developer your organization's 50+ page automation compliance document, its unfair to expect them to have the unique knowledge to interpret that document and validate that workflow meets all the standards.
In addition, you need the ability to evaluate every workflow execution to ensure that it meets your compliance standards. For example, many organizations will have 20-30 variants of a simple workflow to "create an Azure VM." Every single one of them might run a few times a week. If only half are compliant, how do you identify the non-compliant ones to ensure the developers fix them?
CodeCargo as the Source of Truth
CodeCargo has a few built-in features that make it much easier for organizations to actually reuse their workflows in a way that protects the enterprise and makes it easy for developers to consume.
Private Reusable Workflow and Actions Marketplace --> CodeCargo has a private marketplace for your workflows and Actions. Administrators and architects can import those automations into the application. This solves the "discoverability" challenge because any developer can immediately see which workflows they should be using, and can find existing workflows before creating one from scratch.
Compliance at Scale --> CodeCargo automatically calculates compliance scores for all of your GitHub Actions Workflows. This provides valuable information to ensure that your workflows meet enterprise standards. When our platform detects a non-compliant workflow, it provides the developer valuable information that will help them fix it with GitHub Copilot.
The Bottom Line
The future of platform engineering isn't just automation, templates, or documentation — its reuse. Teams that can share operational logic as easily as they do code will move faster, remain compliant, secure their systems, and build trust between developers and platform teams.
C
CodeCargo Team
The CodeCargo team writes about GitHub workflow automation, developer productivity, and DevOps best practices.
