Track 10: CI/CD and GitOps

You've now built infrastructure by hand (AKS, track 07) and declaratively (Terraform, track 09), and you can drive Git fluently through branches, rebases, and pull requests (track 08). This track is about the other half of a real platform: automating the software delivery pipeline itself — build, test, package, and deploy — so that shipping a change is a git push and a merge, not a sequence of manual docker and kubectl commands. Then it takes you one step further, from push-based CI/CD (a pipeline reaches into the cluster and applies changes) to pull-based GitOps (a controller inside the cluster continuously reconciles the cluster against a Git repo as the single source of truth).

Track 07's module 08 already built one small GitHub-Actions-to-AKS workflow — build an image, push to ACR, kubectl set image. This track does not repeat that; it assumes you did it, briefly recaps it, and then goes much deeper and much broader: the anatomy of a pipeline, GitHub Actions as a real tool (reusable workflows, matrix builds, environments), testing and required status checks gating PR merges, image tagging strategy, deployment strategies (rolling, blue/green, canary), ArgoCD and GitOps, progressive delivery with Argo Rollouts, and pipeline security with OIDC federation and protected environments.

Cost warning: several modules deploy to a real AKS cluster and push to a real ACR. An idle AKS cluster still bills for its node VMs. Reuse a single small cluster across the track where you can, and tear it down with az group delete --name <rg> --yes --no-wait when you stop for the day. GitHub Actions minutes on public repos are free; on private repos you get a monthly allowance — keep triggers scoped so you don't burn it.

How this track works

  • Go in order — module 01 assumes the pipeline vocabulary from module 00, module 05 (GitOps) assumes the deployment strategies from module 04, and the capstone assumes all of it.
  • Every module except this index and the capstone follows the same shape: Why this matters → Concepts → Command reference → Hands-on exercises → Independent challenge → Common mistakes & troubleshooting → Checkpoint quiz → Next. Two modules (02 and 05) add a Cumulative review before their Next link.
  • Exercises use real GitHub Actions workflows in a real GitHub repo, and a real AKS cluster with ArgoCD installed on it. This is not a simulator — wiring the real thing together is the point.
  • The capstone (module 08) drops the quiz/challenge/review scaffolding and asks you to build one complete pipeline end to end: PR triggers tests, merge to main builds and pushes a SHA-tagged image to ACR, and ArgoCD syncs a Git-committed manifest change to AKS with a progressive rollout.

Modules

# Module What it covers Rough time
00 cicd-concepts-and-pipeline-anatomy CI vs. CD vs. continuous deployment, pipeline stages, triggers, artifacts, environments, push vs. pull delivery 45-60 min
01 github-actions-deep-dive Workflows/jobs/steps/runners, expressions and contexts, matrix builds, reusable workflows, composite actions, secrets and environments 90-120 min
02 building-and-testing-in-ci Running unit/integration tests, dependency caching, fail-fast, required status checks gating a PR merge (ties to track 08) 75-90 min
03 container-image-pipelines Building and pushing images from CI, tagging strategy (semver vs. SHA vs. latest), Buildx caching, pushing to Terraform-provisioned ACR 75-90 min
04 continuous-deployment-strategies Rolling update, blue/green, and canary — conceptually and applied to Kubernetes/AKS Deployments 75-90 min
05 gitops-and-argocd Push vs. pull, Git-as-source-of-truth, installing ArgoCD, Applications, sync policies, drift detection and self-healing 90-120 min
06 progressive-delivery-canary-and-blue-green Argo Rollouts canary/blue-green in practice, analysis-gated promotion, compared with track 06 Container Apps revision traffic-splitting 90-120 min
07 pipeline-security-and-secrets OIDC vs. long-lived secrets, least-privilege service connections, protecting main/production with required reviewers 75-90 min
08 capstone-project End-to-end: PR-triggered tests, merge builds a SHA-tagged image to ACR, ArgoCD syncs a manifest change to AKS with a canary/blue-green rollout 4-6 hours

Prerequisites

  • 02-docker: building images, Dockerfiles, pushing to ACR.
  • 03-kubernetes: Deployments, Services, ReplicaSets, rollouts, Helm.
  • 07-aks: a real AKS cluster, ACR attach, and especially module 08, the single GitHub-Actions-to-AKS workflow this track builds on.
  • 08-git-and-version-control: branching, rebasing, and the pull-request workflow that required status checks gate.
  • 09-terraform-on-azure: the ACR and AKS this track deploys to are the ones you provision declaratively there.

Start here

Start with 00-cicd-concepts-and-pipeline-anatomy.

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