CI/CD: build, validate, and deliver

Objectives and progression

A six-module technical course with original pipeline and production-support exercises. Learn to interpret dependencies and logs, retain artifacts, apply quality criteria, bound credentials, and diagnose delays or partial effects. Includes documented GitHub Actions, GitLab, Jenkins, and Azure DevOps Services examples, primary references, and an internal assessment of 24 decisions in 60 minutes.

Audience: APS L2/L3, infrastructure, SRE, systems administration teams, and technical managers.

Prerequisites: Application, monitoring, and production-support fundamentals; no bank-specific internal process assumed.

300 estimated study minutes

• Distinguish integration feedback, release readiness, and automatic promotion.
• Organize execution and result transfer according to real dependencies.
• Retain the evaluated output and distinguish persistence from cache optimization.
• Ensure relevant failures stop promotion without losing diagnostics.
• Bound executed code, permissions, and credentials at each stage.
• Diagnose delays and failures without duplicating effects or losing execution control.

Modules

1. Integration and delivery
2. Jobs and dependencies
3. Artifacts and evidence
4. Tests and decisions
5. Identity and trust
6. Operation and recovery

Continue learning

Technical assessments

• Release Management
• GitHub Actions
• Jenkins Engineer
• Git

References and version

CI/CD practices 2026-09; scoped GitHub Actions GitLab Jenkins and Azure DevOps Services documentation

• Frequent integration and automated build/test feedback · 2026-09-30
• Continuous delivery versus continuous deployment · 2026-09-30
• Pipeline stages jobs runners and reusable configuration · 2026-09-30
• Pipeline as code and delivery stages · 2026-09-30
• Test result handling artifacts and credential scope · 2026-09-30
• Directed job dependencies and earlier starts · 2026-09-30
• Durable run outputs versus performance caches · 2026-09-30
• Artifact producer paths retention and selective download · 2026-09-30
• Regenerable dependency caches and trust boundaries · 2026-09-30
• Verified provenance and limits of artifact attestations · 2026-09-30
• Untrusted workflow inputs least privilege and runner isolation · 2026-09-30
• Workflow identity cloud trust and short-lived credentials · 2026-09-30
• Concurrency groups pending queues and cancellation semantics · 2026-09-30
• Bounded retry timeout and stash lifetime · 2026-09-30
• Resource-owned approvals and checks outside pipeline YAML · 2026-09-30