CI/CD security pipeline, stages, gates, and tools
A modern deployment pipeline runs the same gates whether you ship Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation, Bicep, Helm, or plain YAML through GitOps: format → validate → security scan → preview → approval → staging → smoke test → production approval → production. The gates are the contract; the tool is an implementation detail.
Why CI/CD security pipeline explained matters
Skipping a gate moves risk downstream. Skipping the security scan moves it to runtime. Skipping the approval moves it to incident response. A consistent pipeline is the cheapest place to catch problems and the only place that scales across teams.
Common mistakes with CI/CD security pipeline explained
- Treating Terraform as the default and bolting other tools on awkwardly, design the pipeline tool-agnostically.
- Running security scans in soft-fail mode forever, they need a budget and a deadline to enforce.
- Putting the approval gate after deploy-to-staging instead of before deploy-to-production.
- Using a single approval gate for both staging and production instead of separating them.