How to secure your CI CD pipeline

These dashboards display the deployment frequency and state (success/failure) by application. These dashboards enable DevOps leaders to track the frequency and quality of their continuous software release to end users. When selecting CI/CD tools, the focus should be on how to optimize and automate the software development process. An effective CI/CD pipeline uses open-source tools for integration, testing and deployment. Correct configuration of your CI/CD process also impacts the success of the software development pipeline.

This makes it easier to see the pipeline’s value, spot problems over time, and invest in ways to build and enhance the CI/CD pipeline. Note that CI/CD based in the cloud function basically the same but rely heavily on tools and services native to the cloud provider’s platform. For example, here is a walkthrough to build a CI/CD pipeline based on Azure DevOps and GitHub. You can integrate these APIs in deployment pipelines to verify the behavior of newly deployed instances, and either automatically continue the deployments or roll back according to the health status. The context propagation from CI pipelines (Jenkins job or pipeline) is passed to the Maven build
through the TRACEPARENT and TRACESTATE environment variables that match the W3C Trace Context specification.

Continuous integration vs. continuous delivery vs. continuous deployment

In this example, the terraform plan is executed only when files with the .tf extension are changed in the terraform folder and its subdirectories. An additional rule ensures the job is executed for merge request pipelines. With the changes continuous integration monitoring keyword, you can watch for changes to certain files or folders for a job to execute. GitLab uses the output from git’s diffstat to determine files that have changed and match them against the array of files provided for the changes rule.

These integration artifacts use the standard public ODATA APIs of the SAP Integration Suite and the public GitHub REST API under the hood to create CI/CD pipelines. The diagram describes the general architecture of the solution, beginning with SAP Cloud Integration where integration artifacts/flows are executed as part of a CI/CD pipeline. GitHub is used as the Source Code Management (SCM) tool since it is the most popular choice in the community. Moreover, you’ll need to install additional tools or programs on your local computer to kickstart the CI/CD process. Most modern developer tools, such as VS Code, even SAP BAS, etc. now come equipped with native Git integration. However, SAP Cloud Integration differs significantly from other development tools, and as a result, implementing a CI/CD solution for it presents unique challenges.

Slow deployments

The Service page provides more granular insights into your CI/CD workflows by breaking down health
and performance metrics by pipeline. To quickly view which pipelines experience the most errors, are the
most frequently executed, or are the slowest, you can sort and filter the list. To provide monitoring dashboards, alerting, and root cause analysis on pipelines, Elastic
works with the communities of the most popular CI/CD platforms to instrument tools with
OpenTelemetry.

• While it may seem counterintuitive since CI/CD is about accelerating the pace of software delivery in an automated fashion, start the process with a mentality of slow and steady.
• Often, conveying the value of a CI/CD pipeline involves complex metrics that aren’t inherently meaningful to non-technical stakeholders.
• Several factors can influence the performance and reliability of a CI/CD pipeline, such as authentication, networking, code review, branching strategy, secrets management, change management, and validation.
• Furthermore, you can use these integration artifacts as a starting point for further customization tailored to the needs of your organization or project.
• This integration feeds, out of the box, the Service Map with all the services that are connected to the Ansible Playbook.
• However, there are plenty of attack surfaces teams must account for AWS pipeline security.

Refactoring pipelines may need careful interaction between teams
in the DevSecOps lifecycle. You can also trigger your Maven builds from the CI platform and visualize the end-to-end
pipeline execution in Elastic Observability, including the detailed steps of your CI
pipeline and the Maven build. The Errors overview screen provides a high-level view of the exceptions that CI builds catch.

What is a CI/CD pipeline?

All the above solutions have been crafted by experts and possess their own merits. With this in mind, my goal was to leverage the inherent capabilities of SAP Cloud Integration, alongside the Power of Groovy and APIs, to create a solution that aligns more closely with the platform’s core development style. Application security deals with threats common to modern web apps such as SQL Injections, cross-site scripting (XSS), software components with known vulnerabilities, and insecure configurations. Despite obvious business advantages, a rapid release approach combined with continuous change processes resulting from DevOps principles will in the long run generate new challenges.

Then, they monitor and analyze the transactions to determine how the application would respond if a real user initiated the same transaction. CI/CD tools can help a team automate their development, deployment, and testing. Some tools specifically handle the integration (CI) side, some manage development and deployment (CD), while others specialize in continuous testing or related functions.

Test All Application Components

CI allows developers to work independently, creating their own coding “branch” to implement small changes. As the developer works, they can take snapshots of the source code, typically within a versioning tool like Git. The developer is free to work on new features; if a problem comes up, Git can easily revert the codebase to its previous state. Continuous integration is a process where code written by the developer is committed to a shared central code repository like Git, and every commit is built and tested to ensure that you identify and fix any issues early.

Manual jobs,
allow you to require manual interaction before moving forward in the pipeline. You might do this if the results of a pipeline (for example, a code build) are required outside the standard
operation of the pipeline. Select a pipeline to open the Pipeline Details page and show
the jobs that were run for that pipeline.

CI/CD tools and configuration

However, such a paradigm could also allow undetected flaws or vulnerabilities to slip through testing and wind up in production. For many organizations, automated deployment presents too many potential risks to enterprise security and compliance. These teams prefer the continuous delivery paradigm in which humans review a validated build before it is released. The next step in the pipeline is continuous delivery (CD), which puts the validated code changes made in continuous integration into select environments or code repositories, such as GitHub. Here, the operations team can deploy them to a live production environment.

It focuses on the later stages of a pipeline, where a completed build is thoroughly tested, validated and delivered for deployment. Continuous delivery can — but does not necessarily — deploy a successfully tested and validated build. CI employs a variety of tools and automation techniques to create builds and shepherd them through initial testing, such as sniff or unit testing, along with more comprehensive integration testing. The limited nature of each iteration means that bugs are identified, located, reported and corrected with relative ease. In the example above, the deploy job has the build-dev job as a dependency before it runs; however, when the commit branch is the project’s default branch, its dependency changes to build-prod and qa-checks.

Software Testing

Modern applications are developed using a variety of tools and platforms, requiring a means of integration and validation of every code change to make sure those changes don’t break the application. Continuous integration automates the process of building, packaging and testing code whenever a team member executes version control changes. This makes it easier for teams to commit code changes more frequently, resulting in improved collaboration and app quality. Continuous Integration refers to the practice of frequently integrating code changes made by developers into a shared repository. This ensures that code changes are continuously tested and integrated with the existing codebase, which helps identify and resolve any issues early on.