Week 5 - Containers & CI/CD

Welcome to Week 5! You have built ingestion pipelines and transformed data. Now it is time to package your work so it runs reliably anywhere. This week covers containers and CI/CD: how to manage dependencies, build Docker images, configure applications with environment variables, and automate quality checks before deploying to Azure.

By the end of this week, you will have a containerized data ingestion app with an automated CI pipeline that lints, formats, and pushes your image to Azure Container Registry.

Learning goals

Manage Python project dependencies consistently using either requirements.txt or uv
Write a Dockerfile that packages a Python data application into a reproducible container image
Run containerized applications locally with Docker, passing configuration through environment variables
Configure linting and formatting steps in a GitHub Actions workflow
Configure a GitHub Actions workflow that runs CI checks on every push
Log in to a shared Azure Container Registry and push a container image to it manually
Push a container image to Azure Container Registry using GitHub Actions
Verify a container image is correctly tagged and pushed to Azure Container Registry

Prerequisites

Docker Desktop installed and running
Azure CLI installed and logged in (az login)
GitHub account with Actions enabled
Azure for Students account (from Week 1)

Chapters

Supplementary

Slides (PDF)

Career relevance: Week 5

Glossary: Week 5

Going Further

History of Containers and CI/CD