What you will learn
- Design delivery pipelines as products — versioned, tested, and owned by the shipping team
- Embed security gates (SAST, dependency scan, secrets) without blocking flow
- Implement GitOps: Git as source of truth with automated cluster reconciliation
- Know when Jenkins orchestrates builds vs when Argo CD owns deployment
- Promote artifacts through Nexus or ECR with clear environment boundaries
- Prepare for AWS DevOps Engineer Professional and GCP Professional DevOps Engineer objectives
Three pillars of this program
DevOps — flow & feedback
Shorten the path from commit to production. Automate repetitive work. Measure lead time, deployment frequency, and failure recovery — then improve them deliberately.
DevSecOps — shift left
Security checks run on every commit, not in a ticket queue before release. Policy, scanning, and compliance as code — fail fast, fix early.
GitOps — declarative delivery
The cluster matches what Git says. Drift is visible. Rollback is a revert. Auditors love it; on-call engineers sleep better.
Weekend 1
Source control & pipeline fundamentals
How teams structure repos, branches, and pull requests for safe continuous integration. Introduction to pipeline-as-code concepts.
- Trunk-based development vs short-lived feature branches
- PR reviews, conventional commits, and semantic versioning
- Pipeline stages: build → test → artifact → deploy → verify
- Environment promotion: dev → staging → production gates
- Illustrative tools: Git, GitHub/GitLab, Jenkinsfile structure
LabConfigure a multibranch Jenkins job triggered by PR; define stage skeleton.
Weekend 2
Build & test automation
Reproducible builds with pinned dependencies. The test pyramid in practice — unit fast, integration realistic, contract tests at boundaries.
- Maven/Gradle lifecycle — compile, package, publish
- Parallel test stages and flaky test management
- Testcontainers for integration tests without mocks-only fantasy
- Build caches and artifact immutability
LabMaven build in Jenkins with JUnit reports and failed-build notifications.
Weekend 3
Quality gates & DevSecOps scanning
SonarQube quality thresholds, dependency vulnerability scanning, and secret detection in CI — before code merges to main.
- SAST with SonarQube — coverage, duplications, security hotspots
- OWASP Dependency-Check and supply chain awareness
- Secret scanning in repos and build logs
- Quality gate policies — when to block vs warn
- SBOM basics for compliance conversations
LabWire SonarQube gate into pipeline; fail build on critical vulnerabilities.
Weekend 4
Artifacts, containers & registries
Versioned binaries in Nexus or AWS ECR. Docker images built with best practices and scanned before promotion.
- Nexus repository types — Maven, npm, Docker proxy/hosted
- ECR lifecycle policies and cross-account image sharing
- Dockerfile layering, non-root users, minimal base images
- Image scanning with Trivy or equivalent
- Semantic tags: git SHA, semver, and environment tags
LabPublish JAR to Nexus; build and push image to ECR with scan gate.
Weekend 5
Deployment models — Jenkins push vs Argo CD pull
The heart of the program: two valid patterns, one clear handoff. Jenkins builds and promotes; Argo CD reconciles cluster state from Git.
- Imperative deploy: Jenkins Kubernetes plugin, helm upgrade in pipeline
- GitOps: manifest repo structure, Kustomize/Helm in Git
- Argo CD applications, sync policies, auto-sync vs manual promote
- Drift detection and rollback via Git revert
- Running Jenkins itself on Kubernetes — controller and agent pods
- Handoff contract: image digest in Git triggers Argo sync
LabFull flow: commit → Jenkins build/test/scan → ECR → update Git → Argo CD deploy.
Weekend 6
Release verification & capstone
Smoke tests post-deploy, canary concepts, feature flags intro. Capstone: complete pipeline with documentation. DevOps certification exam orientation.
- Post-deploy smoke and synthetic checks
- Blue/green and canary — when GitOps meets progressive delivery
- Argo Rollouts overview
- Pipeline observability — DORA metrics intro
- AWS DevOps Pro / GCP DevOps Engineer — topic mapping
CapstoneDocumented pipeline from Git commit to running app on K8s with rollback demo.
Example toolchain (illustrative)
Principles transfer to GitLab CI, Azure DevOps, or GitHub Actions. We teach patterns; you map them to your employer's stack.
Jenkins
Maven
SonarQube
Nexus
AWS ECR
Docker
Argo CD
Kubernetes
