DevSecOps in Practice

CI/CD as the Backbone of DevSecOps

To enforce security at every stage, your pipelines must reflect the security posture you’ve worked hard to define. Each layer of your DevSecOps foundation needs to plug into the CI/CD pipeline, enforcing checks, running tests, and either blocking or allowing progression. CI/CD and the continuity of security checks are easier when you adopt the "everything as code" mindset. This means treating your CI/CD pipeline, security policies, and even your infrastructure as code.

A typical DevSecOps pipeline is a tightly integrated process that begins with the developer and extends all the way through production and back again in a continuous feedback loop. It starts when a developer writes code and runs pre-commit checks locally—tools that automatically scan for secrets, insecure infrastructure-as-code patterns, or formatting issues. These checks help catch issues early, before the code even leaves the laptop.

Once the code is ready, the developer may push it to a feature branch in the version control system. This action triggers a series of automated workflows, including security scans, static analysis, and basic testing, in addition to any unit tests the developer has written. The developer then opens a merge request, which becomes a critical collaboration point for the team. Here, peer reviews take place, and automated checks are expanded to include more thorough static application security testing (SAST), software bill of materials (SBOM) generation, and compliance validation. The rule is that every change, whether it is a new feature, a bug fix, or a merge with another code branch, must trigger the pipeline.