🚀 DevOps Journey – Week 4: Diving Deep into Jenkins, Pipelines & CI/CD

This week was all about Jenkins and building my first real CI/CD pipeline with multiple integrations. I followed a long, in-depth tutorial that covered everything from basic Jenkins setup to advanced topics like ArgoCD, SonarQube, Trivy, and email notifications. The tutorial itself used AWS EC2 and an EKS cluster, but for practice, I challenged myself to run everything on my local machine instead.

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🔹 What I Learned This Week

• Jenkins Setup & Jobs → Installed Jenkins, explored the dashboard, and created freestyle jobs.

• Declarative Pipelines → Built pipelines using Jenkinsfile instead of manual clicks.

• SonarQube & Trivy Integration → Added code quality and vulnerability scanning to my pipeline.

• Email Notifications → Configured Jenkins to send me an email if the pipeline passed or failed.

• ArgoCD → Deployed changes continuously using GitOps principles.

By the end, I had a pipeline where every code commit triggered:

1. Build → 2. Quality & Security Scan → 3. Deployment → 4. Notification 🚦

   

   

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🔹 The Challenges I Faced

It wasn’t smooth sailing 😅. Since the tutorial was using EC2 and EKS, I had to debug a ton of errors to make it work on my local setup.

• The biggest frustration: when I restarted Jenkins one time, my whole project vanished. I had to rebuild the pipeline again from scratch.

• The second time it happened, I somehow managed to recover my old Jenkins account — which felt like a small victory.

• These issues made me realize the importance of persistence and backups for Jenkins data.

I also noticed that running everything on free-tier/local resources has limits. I’m seriously considering moving to a paid plan (AWS EC2/EKS) so I can work with real-world infra and avoid such resets.

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🔹 What’s Next (Week 5 Plan)

For next week, my focus is on Terraform. I want to learn how to provision infrastructure with code instead of clicking around in the AWS console.

My plan is to:

• Recreate the same pipeline project I built this week.

• But this time, deploy it on an EKS cluster using Terraform for provisioning.

That way, I’ll practice both IaC + CI/CD + GitOps together 💡.

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✅ Reflection:
Week 4 was tough but rewarding. The errors I faced forced me to debug, read logs, and really understand how Jenkins works under the hood. It feels like I’ve moved beyond just “following tutorials” to actually solving real problems — which is the essence of DevOps.