When your infrastructure lives in a single region, deployments are usually straightforward.
But once you expand to multi-region AWS setups, deployment speed and maintainability quickly become challenges.

That’s exactly what happened to us.

The Problem: Tedious Multi-Region Deployments

At first, our deployment workflow was simple: one job, one region.

But as we expanded across multiple AWS regions, I ended up with copy-pasted GitHub Actions jobs — slightly tweaked per region.

It worked, but:

• 😅 Repetition everywhere: nearly identical blocks of YAML
• 🐌 Slow deployments: jobs ran one after another
• 🔧 Hard to scale: every new region meant duplicating yet another job

This setup was brittle, noisy, and difficult to maintain. I knew there had to be a better way.

The Breakthrough: Matrix Strategy in GitHub Actions

That’s when I discovered the matrix strategy in GitHub Actions.

Instead of repeating jobs for every AWS region, I defined a single job with a region matrix.

With one concise block, GitHub Actions dynamically created a job per region — running in parallel.

Example: Multi-Region Deployment Workflow

Here’s a simplified example:

name: Deploy to AWS

on:
  push:
    branches: [main]

jobs:
  deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    strategy:
      matrix:
        region: [us-east-1, eu-west-1, ap-southeast-1]

    steps:
      - name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v4

      - name: Configure AWS Credentials
        uses: aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v4
        with:
          aws-access-key-id: ${{ secrets.AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID }}
          aws-secret-access-key: ${{ secrets.AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY }}
          aws-region: ${{ matrix.region }}

      - name: Deploy with Terraform
        run: |
          terraform init -backend-config="region=${{ matrix.region }}"
          terraform apply -auto-approve

What happens here:

The workflow defines a matrix of regions

GitHub Actions automatically spawns a parallel job per region

No copy-paste, no clutter, no maintenance headaches

Why It Works So Well

Here’s what made the matrix strategy a game-changer:

✅ Declarative & concise – one job definition, many regions ⚡ Faster deployments – regions deploy in parallel, cutting total time ~50% 🔁 Easily scalable – add/remove regions with a single line 🛠️ Maintainable – no brittle, repetitive YAML blocks

Lessons Learned

Think in abstractions: If you’re repeating YAML, there’s probably a better way.

Parallelism matters: Deployments don’t have to be sequential — GitHub Actions can fan out tasks efficiently.

Keep it simple: The fewer repeated blocks in your workflow, the easier it is to maintain over the long term.

Final Thoughts

Matrix strategy in GitHub Actions turned what was once a slow, repetitive deployment process into a fast, scalable, and clean pipeline.

If you’re deploying across multiple AWS regions (or even across multiple environments like dev/staging/prod), this feature is hands-down one of the most valuable tools to keep your delivery pipeline both fast and maintainable.