📄️ Table of contents
Free discovery course on CI/CD in 7 pedagogical lessons. Understand the difference between continuous integration, continuous delivery and continuous deployment, the anatomy of a pipeline, deployment strategies, the GitHub Actions, GitLab CI and Jenkins tools, and the DORA metrics.
📄️ 1 · The problem CI/CD solves
Before CI/CD, teams shipped every six months in pain: merge hell, endless manual testing, Friday-evening deployment. This lesson explains precisely the problems that CI/CD came to solve.
📄️ 2 · CI, delivery, continuous deployment
Three notions that even professionals confuse. Rigorous definitions of continuous integration, continuous delivery and continuous deployment, with the history since Extreme Programming in 1991.
📄️ 3 · Anatomy of a pipeline
Understand how a CI/CD pipeline is built: the checkout, build, test, scan, package and deploy steps, the difference between stage and job, the role of runners, and the management of artifacts and caches. Complete example explained line by line.
📄️ 4 · Deployment strategies
Comparison of the five production deployment strategies: recreate, rolling update, blue-green, canary release and feature flags. How each works, its cost, risk, rollback time and use cases.
📄️ 5 · The tools compared
Honest comparison of CI/CD tools in 2026: GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, CircleCI, Azure Pipelines, Tekton and Argo Workflows. Strengths, weaknesses, pricing, and a recommendation based on your context.
📄️ 6 · DORA metrics and best practices
Understand the four DORA metrics: deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate and time to restore service. With the thresholds by performance level and the ten essential CI/CD best practices.
📄️ 7 · Real use cases + FAQ
How Amazon, Netflix, Etsy and Google practice CI/CD at large scale. Documented real use cases, when CI/CD is not a good fit, and 14 frequently asked questions to get started with confidence.
📄️ 🏆 Quiz and attestation
Test your CI/CD knowledge with a free 5-question quiz, corrected and explained: continuous integration, blue-green, canary, DORA metrics, feature flags.