CI/CD for Beginners: Automate Your First Deployment
Overview
Manually deploying code is slow, error-prone, and doesn't scale. CI/CD pipelines are the backbone of modern software delivery — enabling teams to ship faster, catch issues earlier, and deploy with confidence.
In this beginner-friendly, hands-on technical masterclass, participants will learn the fundamentals of Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) by building and automating their very first deployment pipeline.
The facilitator will walk through core CI/CD concepts, common tools, and real-world workflows used in enterprise and financial-sector environments, giving participants a practical foundation they can build on in their own projects.
The session will close with a live Q&A, where participants can ask about pipeline design, automation best practices, and how CI/CD fits into broader DevOps and cloud careers.
About the Facilitator
Ian Kisali is a DevOps Engineer at I&M Bank Group with 5+ years of experience developing cloud infrastructure for enterprise and financial-sector environments. He has a proven track record designing pipelines, Kubernetes-based orchestration platforms, and observability stacks across AWS and hybrid environments, with hands-on experience leading DevOps initiatives in banking and telecom contexts.
His expertise spans RAG systems, agentic AI infrastructure, Infrastructure as Code (Terraform), CI/CD automation, and container security. As an SRE Intern at Safaricom PLC, Ian enhanced monitoring for critical services including M-Pesa, led a migration from Dynatrace to ELK that cut costs by 26%, and implemented Prometheus/Grafana for containerized platforms. He's currently upskilling in AI/ML and agentic AI, exploring how AI-driven automation can be integrated into DevOps workflows.
Target Audience
Beginner Software Developers and Engineers
Aspiring DevOps and SRE professionals
IT and Cloud professionals new to CI/CD
Students and career-switchers exploring DevOps
Anyone looking to automate their first deployment pipeline
Expected Outcomes
By the end of the session, participants will:
Understand the core concepts of Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment
Learn the building blocks of a CI/CD pipeline, from code commit to deployment
Gain practical experience automating a first deployment
Pick up best practices used in enterprise and financial-sector environments
Leave with a foundation to explore CI/CD tools and workflows independently