Chapter 54: CI/CD Pipelines & GitOps with ArgoCD

You build the gitops-deployment skill first, then refine it across CI/CD foundations and ArgoCD GitOps patterns until you have a production pipeline for your agent services.

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Goals

• Design CI/CD pipelines in GitHub Actions (build, test, quality gates)
• Apply GitOps principles with ArgoCD as the declarative source of truth
• Configure ArgoCD apps, sync strategies/waves/hooks
• Scale with ApplicationSets; secure with Projects/RBAC and secrets management
• Run progressive delivery (canary/blue-green) with health/notification hooks
• Operate multi-cluster GitOps and capture patterns in a reusable skill

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Lesson Progression

#	Lesson	Focus
0	Build Your GitOps Skill	Scaffold from docs
1-4	CI/CD Fundamentals	Concepts, Actions workflows, Docker builds, tests
5-9	GitOps & ArgoCD Core	Principles, architecture, first app, sync strategies/waves
10-15	Production Patterns	ApplicationSets, RBAC/Projects, health/notifications, progressive delivery, secrets, multi-cluster
16	AI-Assisted GitOps	Use AI to author/review pipelines
17	Capstone: End-to-End Pipeline	Commit-to-cluster production pipeline
18	Finalize GitOps Skill	Package prompts and patterns

Each lesson ends with a skill reflection: test, find gaps, and improve.

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Outcome & Method

You finish with an automated pipeline that builds, tests, and deploys your Kubernetes agent via ArgoCD, plus a GitOps skill for future projects. The flow moves from foundations to ArgoCD production patterns, then AI-assisted authoring, ending in a spec-driven capstone.

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Prerequisites

• Chapters 49-51 (Docker, Kubernetes, Helm)
• Context from Chapters 52-53 (Kafka, Dapr) for services you deploy