CI/CD with Jenkins & GitHub Actions
Own how software ships. Build pipelines that are fast, secure and affordable on the platform enterprises still run — and the one everything new is built on. For fresh IT graduates and working engineers who will own a release process, where the blast radius is production.
This is a course about the delivery platform itself — pipeline architecture at scale, self-hosted runner infrastructure, supply-chain security, cost control, deployment strategies, and migrating between tools — for engineers who own how software ships. It is taught on both an enterprise incumbent and the modern default, because the real job in most organisations spans both. Delivery engineering is one of the most consistently demanded DevOps skills: every organisation ships software, and almost none of them ship it as well as they'd like.
Why teach Jenkins in 2026? Because the money is honest. Greenfield projects don't choose Jenkins — but banks, telecoms, manufacturers, government and large services organisations run tens of thousands of Jenkins pipelines that aren't going anywhere soon, and somebody has to keep them running, secure them, and eventually move them. That somebody is well-rewarded. GitHub Actions, meanwhile, is the default for new work on GitHub — no server to run, native pull-request integration, workflow changes reviewed like code, modern identity primitives. Knowing both, and being able to move work between them, is the combination enterprise employers pay a premium for — and migration is this course's flagship differentiator, because almost no course covers it and it is exactly what that work requires.
It is designed for two audiences at once. If you are a fresh IT graduate targeting DevOps or build/release roles, delivery engineering is a durable, portable skill you can carry across employers and stacks. If you are a working professional — a developer who wants to own the team's pipeline, or an engineer maintaining a large Jenkins estate who needs modern practice and a migration path — this course is that path. It runs 8 weeks (~60 hours), live and lab-heavy: real pipelines, real deployments, real migrations.
Not the Git & GitHub Course — the Delivery Platform
- Git & GitHub for Developers teaches collaboration and repository practice, with automation as one component — for developers who want to work well in a team.
- CI/CD with Jenkins & GitHub Actions (this course) teaches the delivery platform itself, on both an enterprise incumbent and the modern default — pipeline architecture at scale, runner infrastructure, supply-chain security, cost control, deployment strategies, and migrating between the two. For engineers who own how software ships.
- Clear of its DevOps siblings too: GitOps deployment mechanics belong to Docker & Kubernetes, infrastructure provisioning to Terraform & Infrastructure as Code. This course owns the pipeline.
Jenkins or GitHub Actions? Which Should You Choose?
An honest framing, because a prospect will ask. Jenkins stays entrenched where there are complex legacy integrations, air-gapped or on-premises requirements, multiple version control systems, heavy investment in shared libraries, or regulatory constraints — highly flexible, and correspondingly expensive to own, its real cost being engineering time rather than infrastructure. GitHub Actions is the default for new work on GitHub, with nothing to run and modern permission primitives, though its limits are ecosystem lock-in and cost at scale. And they are not the only options: GitLab CI and Kubernetes-native pipelines exist and are the right answer in some contexts — you'll learn to recognise which. The course teaches the decision, not a dogma.
Migration Is the Flagship
Moving an estate from one platform to the other is a six-to-twelve-month funded programme in a mid-sized organisation, not a weekend task. Conversion tooling handles the mechanical translation of pipeline syntax — but it does not carry over plugin behaviour, shared libraries or custom scripting logic, which is precisely where the work and the expertise live. You will learn assessment, pilot, phased cutover, and running both platforms in parallel during transition — and you'll convert a realistic Jenkins pipeline with shared-library dependencies to GitHub Actions and document exactly what the tooling could not translate.
Why Learn This When AI Writes Pipeline YAML?
AI writes pipeline YAML fluently — and produces the failure modes that cost real money: secrets exposed in logs, over-permissioned tokens, unpinned third-party actions pulling in whatever ships next, caches that silently poison builds, and pipelines that pass while testing nothing. In CI/CD the blast radius is production. The value is judgment about security, cost and change safety — knowing what a pipeline actually does and what it exposes. You'll use AI tooling as an accelerator you review, and learn the failure patterns generated pipeline code repeats, so you ship its speed without shipping its mistakes.
Course at a Glance
- Duration: 8 weeks | ~60 hours | live + hands-on
- Format: Live online · lab-heavy · real pipelines, real deployments, real migrations
- Prerequisite: Comfortable with Git and the command line, and able to read code in some language. Container basics help but are taught as needed.
- Curriculum: 9 modules, from delivery foundations to migration, modernisation and capstone
- Certification: Aligned to the GitHub Actions certification; the Jenkins and migration skills transfer beyond any single credential
- Curriculum reviewed: July 2026 — the delivery tooling landscape moves fast; this syllabus is checked against official documentation
Course Highlights
- Every module leads with what you build, operate or migrate — not what you "learn about"
- Both platforms in depth — GitHub Actions and Jenkins, taught as production systems you operate
- Migration as the flagship — the six-to-twelve-month programme, taught as assessment, pilot and phased cutover
- Supply-chain security: keyless cloud auth, pinned actions, SBOMs, signing, provenance
- Deployment strategies that hold under pressure — canary, blue/green, feature flags, real rollback
- FinOps for CI/CD — where compute minutes actually go and how to cut them without slowing teams
- Self-hosted autoscaling runner fleets and the reliability of the delivery system itself
- AI tooling as an accelerator you review — because in CI/CD the blast radius is production
Hands-on Projects & Portfolio
Build, test matrix, caching, quality gates and artefact publishing.
A declarative Jenkinsfile backed by a shared library.
Approval gates, canary release and automated rollback.
Replace long-lived credentials with short-lived identity in both platforms.
Pinned dependencies, scanning, SBOM, signed artefacts and provenance.
Self-hosted, with cost and queue-time measurement before and after.
Cut a slow build's duration substantially, with evidence.
Convert a realistic Jenkins pipeline with shared-library dependencies to GitHub Actions, and document what the tooling could not translate.
Complete delivery platform plus a written migration plan for a legacy estate.
Tools & Stack
Jenkins GitHub Actions Groovy & Jenkinsfile Jenkins Configuration as Code Docker Kubernetes Helm Argo CD Terraform SonarQube Trivy Syft Cosign OIDC HashiCorp Vault Nexus or Artifactory GitHub Packages OpenTelemetry Prometheus Grafana AWS Azure Git
Certification Alignment
- Modules 2, 4–8 map to the GitHub Actions certification scope — authoring and maintaining workflows and actions, consuming workflows, and managing Actions for the enterprise
- The Jenkins, deployment, supply-chain and migration skills transfer beyond any single credential — this course is deliberately broader than one exam
- Presented as preparation and alignment — no official partnership or accreditation implied, and no exam outcome guaranteed
Career Outcomes
Delivery engineering is one of the most consistently demanded DevOps skills, because every organisation ships software and almost none of them ship it as well as they'd like. The dual-platform framing is deliberate: enterprise environments — particularly large services organisations and global capability centres — run substantial Jenkins estates alongside newer GitHub-based workflows, so engineers who can operate both and move work between them are unusually valuable. Pipeline security and cost control are the fastest-growing parts of the role. This course targets:
- DevOps Engineer
- CI/CD Engineer
- Build & Release Engineer
- Platform Engineer
- Site Reliability Engineer
- Automation Engineer
- DevSecOps Engineer
- Developer who owns their team's delivery process
Who This Course Is For
- Final-year students and fresh IT graduates targeting DevOps or build/release roles
- Developers who want to own their team's pipeline rather than wait on someone else's
- Engineers maintaining large Jenkins estates who need modern practice and a migration path — funded, urgent work
- QA and automation engineers moving into delivery engineering
- System administrators moving into DevOps
- Platform and SRE teams responsible for delivery reliability, security and cost
Material Includes
- Class recordings
- Pipeline starter repos for both platforms
- Migration assessment checklists & supply-chain hardening templates
- Certificate
Prerequisites
- Comfortable with Git and the command line
- Able to read code in some language
- Container basics help, taught as needed
Estimated Time: 6 Hours
You build:- A diagnosis of a deliberately slow release process — measured against the delivery metrics that matter — with the bottleneck identified before a single tool is touched
- What continuous integration, delivery and deployment actually mean and how they differ; trunk-based development and its relationship to pipeline design
- The delivery metrics that matter — lead time, deployment frequency, change failure rate, restore time
- Pipeline anatomy; artefacts and promotion; diagnosing a slow release process before touching a tool
Estimated Time: 7 Hours
You ship:- A reusable, organisation-wide workflow architecture — composite and reusable workflows, environments and approval gates, concurrency control — that scales past a single repository
- Workflow and job architecture; events and triggers; runners; matrix strategies; caching that actually helps; artefacts
- Reusable and composite workflows; environments and approval gates; concurrency control; service containers
- Debugging failing workflows; structuring workflows across a whole organisation rather than one repository
Estimated Time: 8 Hours
You operate:- A Jenkins controller run as production infrastructure — configuration as code, a shared library powering a declarative Jenkinsfile, and dynamic Kubernetes-backed agents provisioned on demand
- Controller and agent architecture; declarative and scripted pipelines; the Jenkinsfile; shared libraries as the mechanism serious Jenkins shops depend on
- The plugin ecosystem and its maintenance burden; credentials management; configuration as code
- Distributed builds and dynamic agents including containerised and Kubernetes-backed ones; operating the controller itself as production infrastructure
Estimated Time: 7 Hours
You ship:- A parallelised, cache-accelerated build with coverage and static-analysis gates that block a bad change — and a monorepo selective-build strategy that only tests what changed
- Building and testing across common language ecosystems; dependency caching and build reproducibility; parallelisation and test splitting
- Flaky test management; coverage and static analysis gates; quality thresholds that block rather than inform
- Monorepo and selective build strategies; keeping pipeline feedback fast enough that people actually wait for it
Estimated Time: 6 Hours
You ship:- A build-once-promote-everywhere release flow — immutable versioned artefacts, automated semantic versioning and generated release notes — no rebuild per environment
- Versioning strategy; build once and promote rather than rebuild per environment; container image and package registries
- Artefact retention and cleanup; changelog and release note generation; semantic versioning automation
- Immutable release artefacts
Estimated Time: 7 Hours
You ship:- A multi-target deployment with a canary release, a feature flag decoupling deploy from release, a database migration in the pipeline, and a rollback that works under pressure
- Deploying to virtual machines, containers, Kubernetes and serverless targets; blue/green, canary and rolling releases
- Feature flags decoupling deployment from release; database migrations in a pipeline; approval workflows and change management for regulated environments
- Rollback that works under pressure; smoke tests and automated verification after deploy
Estimated Time: 8 Hours
You ship:- A hardened pipeline: keyless cloud authentication with short-lived identity, least-privilege job permissions, pinned and vetted actions, scanning, an SBOM, and signed artefacts with provenance
- Secrets management and why they leak; keyless authentication to cloud providers using short-lived identity rather than stored credentials; least-privilege job permissions
- Pinning and vetting third-party actions and plugins; protecting self-hosted runners from untrusted code; dependency and container scanning in the pipeline
- SBOM generation; artefact signing and provenance attestation; audit trails for compliance
Estimated Time: 6 Hours
You ship:- An autoscaling ephemeral runner fleet with build-cache infrastructure and pipeline observability — plus a FinOps exercise cutting compute minutes with measured before/after
- Self-hosted and autoscaling runner fleets; ephemeral agents; queue times and capacity planning; build cache infrastructure
- Observability for pipelines including tracing a slow build; reliability of the delivery system itself
- FinOps for CI/CD — where compute minutes actually go and how to cut them without slowing teams down
Estimated Time: 5 Hours
You migrate:- The flagship: a realistic Jenkins pipeline with shared-library dependencies converted to GitHub Actions — with a written record of what conversion tooling could not translate — plus your capstone delivery platform and a migration plan for a legacy estate
- Assessing an existing pipeline estate; conversion tooling and what it genuinely cannot translate; handling shared libraries and custom scripting logic
- Phased cutover and running both platforms in parallel; decommissioning safely; honest comparison with GitLab CI and Kubernetes-native alternatives
- Capstone design, build, secure, operate and defense
- What's App: +91 73-01-11-21-31 for immediate assistance during business hours.
- Email: Send your inquiries to hello@progmatrix.com, and one of our representatives will get back to you as soon as possible.
- Website: You can also use the contact form on our website to send us a message directly.