Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) (Coursera)

You’ll examine the key features of CI, explore social coding, and the Git Feature Branch Workflow. You will also learn about standard CI tools and gain a deep understanding of GitHub Actions workflows and their components.

This course provides an overview of CD and its goals, benefits, and best practices. You will learn the requirements of a CI/CD pipeline and discover standard CD tools.

You will explore Tekton and discover how its components work together to create a CD pipeline. You will learn how to build a pipeline, pass parameters to a pipeline, build triggers to start pipeline runs, implement reusable tasks, and create custom tasks. You will discover how to complete your CD pipeline by building a container image and deploying your application to an OpenShift Kubernetes cluster.

Throughout the course, you can hone your skills and challenge yourself through several hands-on labs.

Course 11 of 13 in the IBM DevOps and Software Engineering Professional Certificate.

What You Will Learn

- Explain Infrastructure as Code, describe tools used, and create Infrastructure as Code scripts using Terraform.

- Describe cloud platforms and automation, and automatic CI/CD tasks using Jenkins and GitHub.

- Define Continuous Integration (CI) and list some examples of tools used for CI.

- Describe the process of Continuous Development (CD), run test cases, and deploy to cloud using tools including Chef and Puppet.

Syllabus

WEEK 1

Introduction to CI/CD

This module introduces you to Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD), an automated approach to software development. You’ll discover what CI and CD are and the benefits they bring to the DevOps pipeline. You’ll explore popular CI/CD tools and see why it’s acceptable for different teams within an organization to use different CI/CD tools. You’ll also learn about Infrastructure as Code (IaC), the process by which you use code to automate the provision and management of your infrastructure.

WEEK 2

Continuous Integration (CI)

This module provides an overview of Continuous Integration (CI). You will learn the features of CI and its benefits for DevOps. You will explore social coding, a core concept underlying CI, and the four steps for conducting it. You will learn about Git, the version control system (VCS) that enables DevOps. You will examine the five steps of the Git Feature Branch Workflow and the Git commands essential for performing them.

You will then learn about standard CI tools, starting with Jenkins, CircleCI, and Travis CI. You will explore another CI tool, GitHub Actions, in greater depth. You will discover the features and benefits it provides for CI. You will learn about GitHub Actions workflows and their essential components: events, runners, jobs, steps, and actions. You’ll even practice using GitHub Actions to set up and trigger a CI workflow and automate code coverage reporting.

WEEK 3

Continuous Delivery (CD)

This module provides an overview of Continuous Delivery (CD). You will explore CD’s goals, benefits, key principles, and best practices. You will discover the requirements of a CI/CD pipeline and the difference between Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment, a closely related process. You will learn about standard CD tools, including Argo CD and Tekton, and how to choose the best tool for the job.

You will then explore Tekton in greater depth. You will discover its essential components and how they work together to create a CD pipeline. You will learn how to build a pipeline from Tekton tasks, pass parameters to a pipeline, and build triggers that start pipeline runs. You will explore how to implement reusable Tekton tasks from the Tekton Catalog and create your own tasks to automate linting and unit testing. You will discover how to complete your CD pipeline by building a container image and deploying your application to an environment.

WEEK 4

Final Exam

In this module, you will complete a final exam that tests your knowledge of the course’s content. The exam will include questions on topics including but not limited to CI/CD’s principles, features, benefits, tools, and methods of implementation.