Ship a Production CI/CD Pipeline for a Fitness-Studio CRM Startup
Overview
What this challenge is about.
Build a CI/CD pipeline for a fitness CRM startup: audit risks, code 5 GitHub Actions stages, and deploy with ArgoCD. Get a verifiable certificate.
The scenario
FlexDesk sells a CRM purpose-built for boutique fitness studios (yoga, pilates, and spin) that manage class bookings, memberships, and trainer payouts; at pre-seed stage every production outage directly threatens renewals from its ~70 paying studios.
The Brief
What you'll do, and what you'll demonstrate.
Replace FlexDesk's manual 'git pull on production' deploys with an automated GitHub Actions pipeline that includes container signing, a software bill of materials, short-lived cloud authentication, and an approval-gated one-click production release.
Earning criteria — what you'll demonstrate
- Design a multi-stage GitHub Actions pipeline that separates pull-request checks, builds, staging, and gated production release
- Apply supply-chain security practices: multi-architecture builds, software bill of materials generation, and Cosign image signing
- Replace long-lived cloud credentials with short-lived OpenID Connect federated authentication
- Gate database migrations and production releases behind automated safety checks and human approval
- Document an operable, recoverable deployment process that a new engineer can follow without prior context
Program Fit
Where this fits in your program.
Sharpens the same skills your degree expects you to demonstrate.
Aligned coursework coming soon.
Skills
Skills you'll demonstrate.
Each one shows up on your verified credential.
- Ci Cd
Apply ci cd to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Github Actions
Apply github actions to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Container Signing
Apply container signing to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Sbom
Apply sbom to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Argocd
Apply argocd to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Deployment Safety
Apply deployment safety to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
Careers
Career paths this challenge builds toward
Completing this challenge demonstrates skills that transfer directly to these roles:
DevOps Engineer
Building this pipeline mirrors the core DevOps job: turning fragile manual deploys into automated, auditable releases. You practice authoring workflows, wiring continuous delivery, and gating risky changes exactly as you would owning a production deployment platform.
This challenge sharpens
- ci-cd
- github-actions
- deployment-safety
Platform / Release Engineer
Release engineers own the path code takes to production. This challenge has you implement progressive delivery through staging and approval-gated production with rollback, the day-to-day responsibilities of a platform team supporting multiple product engineers.
This challenge sharpens
- ci-cd
- argocd
- deployment-safety
Software Supply Chain Security Engineer
Signing images, producing a software bill of materials, and removing long-lived credentials are the foundations of supply-chain security. This work bridges directly to roles hardening the build-and-release process against tampering and dependency risk.
This challenge sharpens
- container-signing
- sbom
- github-actions