End-to-End CI/CD Project — Overview

You'll build the pipeline real teams run in production: developer pushes to Git → tests run → code quality gate → security scan → artifact stored → Docker image built and pushed → deployed to Kubernetes → monitored.

Architecture (memorise this picture!)

       Developer
          |  git push
          v
      GitHub (private repo)
          |
          v
       Jenkins  ──────────┐
       /  |    \           \
      v   v     v           v
   Maven Trivy SonarQube  Nexus   (build, scan, quality, artifact store)
                            |
                            v
                         Docker build + tag
                            |
                            v
                    Push image to Docker Hub
                            |
                            v
                     Kubernetes (Deployment + Service)
                            |
                            v
              Prometheus + Grafana (metrics + dashboards)
                            |
                            v
                     Email on Success / Fail

Servers we'll spin up on AWS (6 EC2 t2.medium)

#	Server	Purpose
1	Kubernetes master	Control plane
2	K8s worker node 1	Runs pods
3	K8s worker node 2	Runs pods
4	Jenkins	Orchestrates the pipeline
5	SonarQube + Nexus	Code quality + artifact/image store
6	Prometheus + Grafana	Monitoring

What each part of the series covers

Part	What you'll do
1	Provision the 6 AWS VMs + security groups
2	Install Kubernetes with kubeadm (master + workers)
3	Install Jenkins, Nexus (Docker), SonarQube (Docker)
4	Write the Jenkinsfile — 11 stages from checkout to deploy
5	Install Prometheus + Grafana, add email notifications

Prerequisites

• Comfortable with Linux commands (see Linux series).
• Basic Git & GitHub (see Git cheat sheet).
• Understand Docker basics.
• AWS free-tier account (or any 6 Ubuntu VMs).

Real-world value

By the end you can put on your CV: "Built a production-grade CI/CD pipeline with automated code-quality gates, security scans, artifact management, containerization, Kubernetes deployment and monitoring — reduced release cycle from days to under 30 minutes."

That single project has landed hundreds of first DevOps offers. Let's build it.