CI / CD

Automated build, test and deploy pipelines.

CI / CD is taught here in 12 lessons, running from Pipeline stages and artefacts through to Observability and speeding up slow pipelines. Each lesson takes one topic, shows the working code, and links onward to the next, so the course can be read straight through in order.

Lessons

1. Pipeline stages and artefactsOrder stages for the fastest feedback, then promote one immutable artefact through every environment.
2. A GitHub Actions workflowTriggers, jobs, steps, a build matrix and artefacts, written as one workflow file you can adapt.
3. Gates, secrets and deploysWhat must pass before code moves forward, how credentials reach the pipeline safely, and how to roll a bad deploy back.
4. CI/CD concepts and choosing a platformIntegration, delivery and deployment, pipeline as code, runners and agents, hosted versus self-hosted, and how GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins and CircleCI compare.
5. Triggers, concurrency and matrix buildsEvent and path filters, scheduled and manual runs, concurrency groups that cancel stale work, matrix expansion, fail-fast, and job dependencies with needs.
6. Building and publishing container images in CIBuild with buildx and cache layers, tag by commit and branch, push to a registry, scan for vulnerabilities, and generate a software bill of materials.
7. GitLab CI pipelinesThe .gitlab-ci.yml structure, stages, jobs and rules, includes and templates, runners and tags, caches and artefacts, and environments with manual deploys.
8. Testing strategy inside the pipelineLayer unit, integration and end-to-end tests, use service containers for real dependencies, handle flaky tests honestly, split and parallelise, and publish results.
9. Environment promotion and release strategiesPromote one immutable artefact through environments, externalise configuration, and choose between blue-green, canary, rolling and feature-flag releases.
10. Infrastructure as code in the pipelinePlan on pull requests, apply on merge, manage state and locking, detect drift, and keep infrastructure changes separate from application deploys.
11. Pipeline security and supply chainLeast-privilege tokens, pinning actions by SHA, secret scanning, dependency and container scanning, provenance, and running untrusted pull request code safely.
12. Observability and speeding up slow pipelinesFind where the time goes, cache what is safe to cache, build only what changed, use remote execution, track DORA measures, and alert on the failures that matter.

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