CICDTools Pipelines Study Notes

Anatomy of a CI/CD Pipeline

A CI/CD pipeline is a series of automated stages — source, build, test, package, deploy — that a code change flows through, each acting as a quality gate befor…

Automating Builds in Pipelines

How CI systems turn source code into reproducible build artifacts automatically, covering build triggers, dependency resolution, and artifact publishing.

Azure Pipelines Overview

How Azure Pipelines organizes CI/CD around YAML pipelines, agent pools, and stages, and where it fits within the broader Azure DevOps suite.

Blue-Green Deployments

Understand the blue-green deployment pattern for near-instant, low-risk releases and rollbacks by running two full environments and switching traffic between t…

Building Docker Images in Pipelines

Understand how CI/CD pipelines build, tag, and optimize Docker images, including layer caching, multi-stage builds, and build-time security checks.

Caching and Build Artifacts

Learn how CI/CD pipelines speed up builds with dependency caching and pass data between jobs using artifacts, and where each technique fits.

Canary Releases

Learn how canary releases gradually expose a small percentage of real traffic to a new version, using metrics to decide whether to expand or abort the rollout.

CI/CD Interview Questions

A curated set of conceptual and scenario-based CI/CD interview questions covering pipeline design, deployment strategies, and troubleshooting, with model answe…

CI/CD Quick Reference

A condensed reference covering core CI/CD terminology, pipeline stage ordering, deployment strategies, and common commands across major platforms for fast look…

CircleCI Fundamentals

Core concepts of CircleCI — the config.yml structure, orbs, workflows, and executors — for teams evaluating or already using the platform.

Common CI/CD Pitfalls

A survey of recurring mistakes teams make when building CI/CD pipelines — from flaky tests to secret leakage — and the practical fixes for each.

Container Registries and Tagging Strategies

Explore how CI/CD pipelines push images to container registries and the tagging conventions that keep deployments traceable, safe, and repeatable.

Declarative vs Scripted Pipelines

Compare Jenkins' two pipeline authoring styles — the structured, opinionated declarative syntax versus the fully programmable Groovy-based scripted syntax — an…

Dependency Scanning and SAST

Automated dependency scanning and static application security testing catch known-vulnerable libraries and insecure code patterns before they reach production,…

Deploying Containers from CI/CD

Learn the common patterns pipelines use to deploy containerized applications, from direct kubectl updates to GitOps-driven reconciliation.

Designing Multi-Stage Pipelines

Learn how to structure a CI/CD pipeline into logical stages — build, test, package, deploy — so failures surface early and each stage has a clear contract with…

Feature Flags and Progressive Delivery

Feature flags decouple deploying code from releasing it to users, enabling progressive delivery techniques like percentage rollouts and targeted exposure contr…

GitHub Actions Triggers and Events

Learn how GitHub Actions workflows start: the `on:` key, common webhook events, scheduled runs, manual dispatch, and how to filter events by branch, path, or t…

GitHub Actions Workflow Basics

GitHub Actions workflows are YAML files in .github/workflows that define when a pipeline runs, what jobs it contains, and what steps each job executes.

GitLab CI Basics

An introduction to GitLab CI/CD, its `.gitlab-ci.yml` configuration file, stages, jobs, and the GitLab Runner execution model.

Jenkins Architecture Basics

Understand Jenkins' controller/agent architecture, how builds are distributed to executors, and the core components — controller, agents, executors, and the jo…

Jenkins Plugins and Agents

Explore how Jenkins' plugin ecosystem extends core functionality and how agents are provisioned, connected, and secured — including static, SSH, and dynamic cl…

Jenkinsfile Fundamentals

Learn the core building blocks of a Jenkinsfile — agent, stages, steps, environment, parameters, and post — and how Pipeline as Code changed Jenkins pipeline m…

Jobs, Steps, and Runners

Jobs are independent units of work that run on isolated runners, steps are the ordered commands within a job, and runners are the actual machines that execute…