DevOps with GitHub Actions & Docker

DevOps Culture & Toolchain Overview

DevOps lifecycle, SDLC and Agile handoffs. Set up Git, Docker and the Atom Code lab; join the course GitHub organization.

Git Essentials: Commits, Branches & Merges

Stage, commit, branch and merge a feature; resolve a merge conflict and push the history to GitHub.

Collaborating on GitHub: PRs, Reviews & Issues

Open a pull request with required reviews, link issues and branch protection, then merge with a squash commit.

GitHub Actions: Your First Workflow

Write a YAML workflow that lints and tests on every push; read the Actions log and fix a failing step.

Triggers, Events & Scheduled Runs

Add workflow_dispatch, pull_request and cron triggers; compare event payloads and filter branches and paths.

Jobs, Runners & Build Matrices

Split a workflow into parallel jobs with needs, then build across Node versions and OS images in a matrix.

Artifacts, Caching & Concurrency

Cache dependencies, pass build artifacts between jobs and cancel superseded runs with concurrency groups.

Secrets, Environments & Protected Deployments

Store cloud credentials as encrypted secrets and gate a production deploy behind an environment approval.

Self-Hosted Runners on AWS

Provision a self-hosted runner on an EC2 instance, label it and route a Docker build job to it.

Docker Fundamentals: Images & Containers

Run, inspect and commit containers; containerize a Node.js API and map ports and volumes.

Writing Production-Grade Dockerfiles

Layer caching, .dockerignore and a multi-stage build that shrinks the image from 1 GB to about 150 MB.

Docker Compose: Multi-Container Apps

Compose an app + PostgreSQL + Nginx stack with networks, healthchecks and one-command teardown.

Container Registries: GHCR & Amazon ECR

Tag, push and pull versioned images from GHCR and ECR straight from a workflow.

Continuous Integration Pipelines

Assemble a full CI pipeline: lint, unit tests, Docker build and a vulnerability scan on every PR.

Keyless AWS Access: IAM Roles & OIDC

Federate GitHub Actions to AWS via OIDC so deployments run without long-lived access keys.

Continuous Delivery to AWS EC2

Deploy a containerized app to EC2 over SSH in a workflow with health checks and automatic rollback.

Containers on AWS: ECR & ECS Fargate

Ship an image to ECS Fargate from Actions; update the service and watch the rolling deploy.

Static & Serverless Deploys: S3 + CloudFront

Publish a static app to S3 behind CloudFront with cache invalidation on every merge to main.

Monitoring, Logs & Rollbacks

Stream container logs to CloudWatch, alarm on health failures and rehearse a rollback runbook.

Capstone Project: End-to-End CI/CD Pipeline to AWS

Team project from PR to AWS — full CI/CD with matrix builds, a self-hosted runner stage, OIDC deploy, dashboards and badges.