[Instructor] - Hello and welcome to this CloudAcademy course on using Jenkins to create CICD pipelines. 

In this first lecture, we'll cover off the course agenda, intended audience, learning objectives and course prerequisites. Before we start, I'd like introduce myself. My name is Jeremy Cook, I'm one of the trainers here at Cloud Academy, specialising in DevOps. Feel free to connect with either myself or the wider team here at CloudAcademy regarding anything about this course. You can email either myself and/or the CloudAcademy team at support@cloudacademy.com. This training course introduces you to Jenkins. Jenkins is a popular open source tool used to perform continuous integration and continuous delivery. We spend time early on reviewing the key Jenkins features and associated terminology. We then take you through a deep dive in configuring Jenkins to perform automated builds using the Jenkins web administration console in a series of hands-on demonstrations, ensuring that you become familiarized with Jenkins and how to administer it. 

We'll demonstrate features such as installing and setting up Jenkins, creating and configuring pipelines manually, creating and configuring pipelines using a Jenkinsfile, configuring Jenkins pipelines using the Blue Ocean interface, defining build execution environments using Docker containers, triggering build pipelines manually and automatically, navigating downstream and upstream build projects, connecting to version control repositories such as GitHub, setting up build pipelines for Java-based projects using Gradle, recording artifacts and test results, and finally, setting up and scaling out Jenkins with multiple build agents and executors using SSH. During the hands-on demonstrations, we show you how to use Jenkins to build and release different types of software projects. For example, a web front-end which has been developed using the React Javascript framework, for which Jenkins is configured to convert JSX into pure JavaScript using technologies such as Webpack and Yarn. And then, a back-end application developed using Java, Gradle, and Docker, requiring Jenkins to compile the source code, package it into a Webarchive file and then finally releasing it into a Tomcat-based Docker image, complete with Splunk-based instrumentation for logging and monitoring. 

The intended audience for this course includes software build and release engineers, software developers and/or DevOps practitioners. 

By completing this course, you will learn the basic principles of build automation as implemented within Jenkins and how it can be used effectively to manage and maintain your own software projects. Understand how to setup and configure Jenkins pipelines. Understand the key differences between declarative and scripted pipelines. Learn how to perform, manage and maintain artifacts and test results. Learn how to scale out Jenkins using master and build agent setups. Learn about the benefits of codifying our pipeline configurations into a Jenkinsfile. Learn how to leverage Docker containers within a Jenkins pipeline to provide additional build isolation and build tool flexibility. And finally, learn how to install and use the newer more modern pipeline centric BlueOcean user interface. 

The following prerequisites will be both useful and helpful for this course. A basic understanding of CICD, or Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery. A basic understanding of software development and the software development life cycle. And a basic understanding of version control and associated workflows. Now, if you're unfamiliar with CICD, we suggest you pause and consider taking either or both of the following CloudAcademy courses to bring you up to speed. Introduction to Continuous Integration and/or Introduction to Continuous Delivery. 

Okay, the course introduction has now been completed. 

Go ahead and close this lecture and we'll see you shortly in the next one.