DevOps & CI/CD
DevOps is the discipline of shrinking the loop between 'I wrote a change' and 'that change is safely running for users'. Everything else — the tools, the acronyms, the certifications — is downstream of that goal. A team with fast, boring, boring, boring deployments will out-ship a team with beautiful architecture and a scary release process, every time. This track focuses on the practices and tooling that make a deployment boring: version-controlled infrastructure, automated tests that run on every commit, a pipeline that can promote or roll back in minutes, and observability that tells you which change caused which incident.
What this track covers
GitHub Actions and equivalent CI runners, container-based build pipelines, Docker image hygiene, deployment strategies (blue-green, canary, rolling), infrastructure-as-code fundamentals, secrets management, and the observability triad — logs, metrics, traces — that turns a black-box deploy into something you can reason about.
Who this is for
Backend engineers who currently deploy by hand or by shell script and want to graduate to a proper pipeline, and platform / SRE engineers building the CI/CD substrate that many product teams will use.
Prerequisites
- Comfortable with Git — branches, pull requests, rebasing
- Can build and run a Docker image locally
- Basic shell scripting (bash) and YAML familiarity
- Have deployed at least one app to any cloud, even manually
Recommended learning order
// beginner
Start with a CI pipeline for a single service using GitHub Actions and Docker. Get to green builds on every push. Then add automated tests and a container registry push step.
// intermediate
Add deployment automation — pushing to a staging environment on merge, promoting to production on a tag. Introduce secrets management, environment-specific configuration, and health-check-based rollout gates.
// advanced
Move to progressive delivery (canary or blue-green with automated rollback on error-rate spikes), multi-environment matrices, ephemeral preview environments per pull request, and pipeline observability — because at scale your pipeline itself becomes a production system.
Common mistakes to avoid
- Baking secrets into container images or into the CI YAML file
- Running tests only in CI and not locally, so pre-commit feedback is minutes long
- Deploying straight from a laptop 'just this once' and losing the audit trail
- One giant pipeline for the whole monorepo that takes 40 minutes even when only the README changed
- No rollback plan beyond 'redeploy the previous commit' — which fails when the previous commit's DB migration is already applied
Career relevance
DevOps and platform-engineering roles are among the highest-paid backend-adjacent positions, and the skills transfer across the entire industry. Even for pure backend roles, evidence that you understand the delivery pipeline (not just your feature code) is a strong signal at senior interviews.
Featured tutorials in this track
Blue-Green Deployments with Kubernetes — Zero Downtime Releases
A complete production guide to blue-green deployments on Kubernetes — Deployments, Services, Ingress, traffic switching, instant rollback, database compatibility and the full release process.
Observability in Microservices — Prometheus, Grafana and OpenTelemetry
End-to-end observability for Spring Boot microservices: metrics with Prometheus, dashboards with Grafana, distributed tracing with OpenTelemetry, alerting and Kubernetes monitoring.
Infrastructure as Code with Terraform — Deploy AWS Resources Like a Pro
Master Terraform for AWS: workflow, state management, modules, VPC + EC2 + RDS + S3, GitHub Actions CI/CD pipeline, security and production best practices.
GitOps with ArgoCD — The Modern Kubernetes Deployment Strategy
A complete, production-grade guide to GitOps with ArgoCD on Kubernetes — workflow, architecture, multi-environment promotion, auto-sync, rollbacks and Spring Boot deployments.
Automating Database Migrations with Flyway and Spring Boot in a CI/CD Pipeline
Ship safe, versioned, zero-downtime database migrations with Flyway and Spring Boot — including PostgreSQL examples, multi-environment handling and a complete GitHub Actions pipeline.
CI/CD Pipeline with GitHub Actions and Docker
Build a complete CI/CD pipeline that tests, builds and pushes a Spring Boot Docker image on every push using GitHub Actions.