Subject Overview

This subject introduces the principles, practices, tools, governance, and emerging developments of continuous integration and continuous delivery/deployment (CI/CD). It emphasizes practical pipeline design, automation, quality, security, observability, and reliable software delivery within a DevOps environment.

Learning Goal

By completing this subject, students will be able to explain CI/CD concepts and terminology, create and operate a basic secure delivery pipeline, evaluate pipeline performance, apply governance and ethical practices, and recognize contemporary developments such as cloud-native delivery, platform engineering, and AI-assisted automation.

Syllabus

1. DevOps and CI/CD Foundations

Learning Objective: Explain DevOps culture, the software delivery lifecycle, continuous integration, continuous delivery, continuous deployment, feedback loops, and the business value of delivery automation.

Category: foundation

2. Version Control and Collaborative Workflows

Learning Objective: Use distributed version control, repositories, commits, branches, merges, pull requests, tagging, code review, and trunk-based or feature-branch workflows to support integration.

Category: foundation

3. Pipeline Concepts, Architecture, and Terminology

Learning Objective: Describe pipelines, stages, jobs, runners, agents, triggers, artifacts, dependencies, environments, gates, pipeline-as-code, and common CI/CD architecture models.

Category: core

4. Continuous Integration and Build Automation

Learning Objective: Configure automated builds, dependency management, build scripts, validation checks, artifact creation, caching, and fast feedback for frequent code integration.

Category: core

5. Automated Testing and Quality Management

Learning Objective: Integrate unit, integration, API, UI, regression, performance, and acceptance testing; apply test pyramids, quality gates, coverage measures, and strategies for flaky tests.

Category: core

6. Artifact, Package, and Dependency Management

Learning Objective: Manage versioned and immutable build outputs using package and container registries; apply semantic versioning, provenance, retention, and dependency controls.

Category: core

7. Continuous Delivery and Deployment Strategies

Learning Objective: Automate releases across development, testing, staging, and production using approvals, configuration management, feature flags, rolling, blue-green, canary, rollback, and roll-forward methods.

Category: application

8. Infrastructure, Containers, and Cloud-Native Delivery

Learning Objective: Explain infrastructure as code, containers, orchestration, declarative configuration, environment consistency, GitOps, and cloud-based pipeline services through basic practical examples.

Category: application

9. DevSecOps and Software Supply Chain Security

Learning Objective: Embed static, dynamic, dependency, secret, container, and infrastructure scanning into pipelines; apply least privilege, credential protection, SBOMs, signed artifacts, provenance, and vulnerability response.

Category: core

10. Pipeline Observability, Reliability, and Troubleshooting

Learning Objective: Use logs, metrics, traces, notifications, health checks, deployment verification, incident feedback, and systematic fault isolation to operate and troubleshoot pipelines reliably.

Category: application

11. CI/CD Metrics, Analytics, and Decision Making

Learning Objective: Measure lead time, deployment frequency, change failure rate, recovery time, build duration, success rate, queue time, and cost; use dashboards and evidence to identify bottlenecks and prioritize improvements.

Category: application

12. Governance, Management, and Responsible Delivery

Learning Objective: Apply role-based access, separation of duties, approvals, audit trails, compliance controls, policy as code, documentation, ownership, ethical data handling, accessibility, sustainability, and risk-based release decisions.

Category: strategic

13. Contemporary Practice and the Future of CI/CD

Learning Objective: Assess platform engineering, internal developer platforms, progressive delivery, ephemeral environments, serverless pipelines, AI-assisted coding and testing, automated remediation, digital transformation, and the governance risks of AI-generated changes.

Category: contemporary

14. Practical CI/CD Capstone

Learning Objective: Design, implement, document, secure, measure, and demonstrate an end-to-end pipeline that builds, tests, packages, deploys, monitors, and safely rolls back a small application.

Category: application