DevSecOps with Terraform and CICD Pipelines

Author

Govardhana M K
August 19, 2025

In partnership with

TechOps Examples

Hey — It's Govardhana MK 👋

Welcome to another technical edition.

Every Tuesday – You’ll receive a free edition with a byte-size use case, remote job opportunities, top news, tools, and articles.

Every Thursday and Saturday – You’ll receive a special edition with a deep dive use case, remote job opportunities and articles.

👋 Before we begin... a big thank you to today's sponsor ZESTY

Still optimizing Kubernetes costs manually?

It’s time to automate.

Transition confidently from reactive dashboards and scripts to scalable, hands-free Kubernetes optimization with Zesty's playbook.

In this playbook, you will learn how to:

  • Spot the hidden costs of manual Kubernetes optimization

  • Shift from dashboards and scripts to smart, automated workflows

  • Evaluate your current maturity for automation

  • Build a roadmap to hands-free, scalable cost optimization

If you’re not a subscriber, here’s what you missed last week.

To receive all the full articles and support TechOps Examples, consider subscribing:

Big investors are buying this “unlisted” stock

When the founder who sold his last company to Zillow for $120M starts a new venture, people notice. That’s why the same VCs behind Uber and eBay also backed Pacaso. They made $110M+ in gross profit to date. They even reserved the Nasdaq ticker PCSO. Now, you can join, too.

Paid advertisement for Pacaso’s Regulation A offering. Read the offering circular at invest.pacaso.com. Reserving a ticker symbol is not a guarantee that the company will go public. Listing on the NASDAQ is subject to approvals.

IN TODAY'S EDITION

🧠 Use Case

  • DevSecOps with Terraform and CICD Pipelines

👀 Remote Jobs

📚️ Resources

🧠 USE CASE

DevSecOps with Terraform and CICD Pipelines

The more I see terraform code written, maintained and deployed I sense it isn't treated as an app codebase, terraform is just for automating the provisioning isn’t it? This is the generic mindset. Once for all, it is beyond that…

The real impact shows up in how security attention shifts. A misconfigured IAM role or open security group found early is nearly 100X impactful to fix than the same in production. With DevSecOps + Terraform and CI/CD pipelines, that difference is the line between a secure release and a costly breach. Here is the visual illustration of the context.

Architecture In Action

A typical architecture looks like the depiction below. Most teams wire in scans and stop there. The real value comes when you go deeper.

1. Code as the First Security Layer

  • Enforce pull request checks for tflint, tfsec, checkov.

  • Block merges if secrets or hard coded credentials appear.

  • Require plan reviews before apply, treat infra changes like app changes.

2. Pipeline Security Hardening

  • Run Terraform in isolated runners with least privilege IAM roles.

  • Lock and encrypt state in S3 or GCS buckets with restricted access.

  • Pin Terraform and provider versions in pipelines to avoid breaking or malicious updates.

3. Test Beyond Unit

Run ephemeral environment deployments in pipelines for high risk infra changes.

4. Deployment Guardrails

  • Apply compliance controls inline (CIS benchmarks, tagging, encryption).

  • Auto fail applies that drift from baseline policies.

5. Continuous Monitoring

  • Automate drift detection and trigger corrective pipelines, not manual fixes.

  • Feed runtime cloud misconfig alerts back into Terraform repos to keep infra in sync.

I help businesses elevate their value through DevSecOps, Containerization, Analytics, Cloud, SRE and Platform Engineering consultancy services.

What I've Done: 27 Customers served Worldwide, $8M Cloud Costs Saved, 58 Business Cases improved 

Previous Clients: Stanford University, Hearst Corporation, Michael Stores and more

Looking to promote your company, product, service, or event to 55,000+ Cloud Native Professionals? Let's work together.