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🔄 Free CI/CD course: ship often, without stress

Welcome to the most pedagogical CI/CD discovery course. In 7 short lessons, you will understand exactly what continuous integration, continuous delivery and continuous deployment mean — three notions that even experienced professionals regularly mix up.

What this course aims for: answering once and for all the questions "what is CI/CD?", "what is the difference between CI and CD?", "continuous delivery or continuous deployment?", "GitHub Actions or Jenkins?", "what is a canary release?" — with concrete examples and no jargon.

What this course does not do: teach you how to write a .github/workflows/ci.yml file or a Jenkinsfile. That practical mastery is the subject of our Premium CI/CD courses.

What you will discover​

Course contents​

No.LessonMain objectiveDuration
1The problem CI/CD solvesUnderstand why big releases and manual deployment fail6 min
2CI, continuous delivery, continuous deploymentRigorously distinguish the three notions + history since 19917 min
3Anatomy of a pipelineStages, jobs, runners, artifacts, caches, complete example7 min
4Deployment strategiesRecreate, rolling, blue-green, canary, feature flags7 min
5The tools comparedGitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, CircleCI, Tekton, Argo6 min
6DORA metrics and best practicesMeasure delivery performance, test pyramid, secrets6 min
7Real use cases + FAQAmazon, Netflix, Etsy + 14 frequently asked questions5 min
8Quiz and attestationValidate what you have learned in 5 corrected questions3 min

Is this course for you?​

  • You are a developer and your team talks about a "red pipeline" or a "broken build" without you knowing precisely what is running.
  • You are a system administrator and you still deploy by hand over SSH on Friday evenings.
  • You are transitioning into DevOps and you are preparing for an interview where CI/CD will inevitably come up.
  • You are a project manager, product owner or CTO and you want to understand why your team is asking for time to "improve the CI".
  • You hear about DORA metrics and you want to know how to objectively evaluate a delivery team.

No heavy technical prerequisites. Reading the Git in practice course beforehand is recommended — a CI/CD pipeline is almost always triggered by a Git event.

Course plan at a glance​

What you will know by the end​

No configuration to memorize. By the end of the course, you will be able to:

  • Explain in one clear sentence what CI/CD is.
  • Distinguish without hesitation between continuous integration, continuous delivery and continuous deployment.
  • Describe the steps of a pipeline and what each one does.
  • Choose the right deployment strategy based on the acceptable level of risk.
  • Compare GitHub Actions, GitLab CI and Jenkins with real arguments.
  • Interpret the four DORA metrics to evaluate a team.
  • Approach the Premium CI/CD courses confidently to write your first pipelines.

⏱️ Estimated duration​

Around 40 to 45 minutes of reading in total. Each lesson is self-contained — you can read one per day, or go through everything in one evening.

Recommended prerequisite:

  • Git in practice — a pipeline is triggered by a git push or a pull request.

Useful prerequisites:

Natural follow-up after this course:

Frequently asked questions in one answer​

What is CI/CD in one sentence?

CI/CD is a set of practices that automate the building, testing and releasing of software, in order to deliver changes that are small, frequent and reliable rather than big, rare and risky releases.

What is the difference between CI and CD?

CI (continuous integration) = automatically merging and testing every code change into the main branch, several times a day.

CD refers to two distinct practices:

  • Continuous delivery — every validated version is ready to go to production, but a human triggers the deployment.
  • Continuous deployment — every validated version goes to production automatically, without any intervention.

Lesson 2 covers everything in detail with diagrams.

Which tool should you choose to get started?
  • Code on GitHub → GitHub Actions. Free for public repositories, readable syntax, huge marketplace.
  • Code on GitLab → GitLab CI. The most complete native integration on the market.
  • Enterprise with legacy or very specific needs → Jenkins, but its maintenance is heavy.

Lesson 5 compares six tools in detail.

What are the DORA metrics?

Four indicators from Google's DevOps Research and Assessment research program:

  1. Deployment frequency — how many times per day/week do you release to production?
  2. Lead time for changes — how much time between a commit and its release to production?
  3. Change failure rate — what percentage of deployments causes an incident?
  4. Time to restore service — how long does it take to recover after an incident?

Lesson 6 gives the thresholds for each performance level.

Do you need Docker to do CI/CD?

No, but it has become the norm. A pipeline can perfectly well build a .jar, a Go binary or an npm package without ever touching Docker. That said, in 2026 the vast majority of pipelines build a container image, because it guarantees that what was tested is exactly what goes to production.

Is this course enough to set up CI in a company?

This course gives you the complete conceptual understanding — more than enough for an interview or to talk with your team. To write and operate real pipelines (YAML syntax, secrets, matrices, caches, self-hosted runners, protected environments), you need the Premium CI/CD courses.

Want to move on to practice?

This discovery course explains why and how it works, without configuration. To write real workflows (.github/workflows, Jenkinsfile, .gitlab-ci.yml, secrets, matrices, environments), move on to the Premium CI/CD courses — included in all our paid plans.

Other discovery courses not to miss​

Ready? Start with lesson 1 →