CI/CD Fundamentals: Pipelines, Testing and Deployment

What you'll learn

• Explain CI, continuous delivery and continuous deployment.
• Design a pipeline with build, test and deploy stages as code.
• Write GitHub Actions workflows with jobs, steps, caching and matrices.
• Choose blue-green, canary or rolling deployments and manage environments and secrets.
• Monitor releases, roll back safely and measure delivery with DORA metrics.

Syllabus

Module 1: Getting Started

1. The Problem CI/CD Solves
2. Continuous Integration
3. Continuous Delivery vs Continuous Deployment

Module 2: Pipelines

1. What is a Pipeline?
2. Typical Pipeline Stages
3. Pipeline as Code

Module 3: GitHub Actions

1. A Minimal Workflow
2. Jobs & Steps
3. Marketplace Actions
4. Caching & Matrix Builds

Module 4: Automated Testing in CI

1. Why Tests Must Run Automatically
2. Unit vs Integration Tests in a Pipeline
3. Failing Fast

Module 5: Environments

1. Dev / Staging / Production
2. Environment Config & Secrets

Module 6: Deployment Strategies

1. Blue-Green Deployment
2. Canary Releases
3. Rolling Deployments

Module 7: Secrets & Security

1. Managing Secrets in CI
2. Security Scanning in a Pipeline

Module 8: Artifacts

1. Build Artifacts & Registries

Module 9: Observability

1. Monitoring & Rollback
2. Measuring Delivery: DORA Metrics