This is a Computer Weekly Developer Network guest post written by GitLab developer evangelist Fatima Sarah Khalid.
Khalid wrote the full text as follows…
Early in my career, I was the sole developer for city government. My job was to maintain her website for the city. The website consisted of a mishmash of applications, each with little documentation and each involving multiple stakeholders from different departments. Working with various departments, I was the first to make weekly visits to the system administrators in the basement of City Hall to navigate the complexities.
These visits marked the beginning of the shift to DevSecOps.
With DevSecOps, we were able to bring together stakeholders across departments and set up automation tools to streamline processes, speed up website updates, and reduce errors and crashes. Believe please. It wouldn’t be fun if the website crashed during the mayor’s annual speech, rendering the speech inaccessible to voters.
It would be much better if you could apply changes to your speech with one click.
Looking back, I often wonder how my experience working in this city would have been different had I had access to the tools I have today. The city struggled with multiple projects and dependencies, changing release priorities, and constantly having to find and update deprecated code. Implementing custom pipeline configurations, setting up security scans, and using AI-assisted code to support updates helped us work more efficiently, but it didn’t solve everything . For me, the future is automated software delivery, where automated infrastructure can be used to automate the entire DevSecOps cycle, from conception to deployment.
Did someone say automated DevSecOps?
Imagine being able to automate the entire software development process, from problem creation to deployment to your cloud infrastructure of choice. This frees up your team to focus on building solutions to your organization’s more complex challenges. for example:
- Incorporating code test coverage into your CI/CD pipeline allows you to: Deploy with confidence knowing that everything will unfold as expected.
- With automatic deployment, websites like the one I was in charge of It’s running during important events (such as the state of the mayor’s address).
- Advanced pipeline configuration – parent-child pipelines, Multi-project pipelines and merge trains – Make continuous integration, delivery, and deployment more efficient and tailored to the needs of complex projects.
Secure code and compliance
Software automates repetitive tasks and eliminates manual work. By automating parts of the software lifecycle, developers can save time, skip repetitive tasks, and avoid errors. An important part of this lifecycle is keeping your application secure, ensuring that new code does not introduce new vulnerabilities, and meets your organization’s regulatory and compliance standards.
in particular:
- Run security scans to check applications in your CI/CD pipeline data leaks, cross-site scripting, Buffer overflow, or unauthorized access. This allows you to proactively identify application vulnerabilities and weaknesses.
- Set up an audit process for your team to ensure developers are secure Tracing their code and vulnerabilities that can’t be quickly resolved, such as spun WordPress “multisite” It is for campaigns in specific cities and should be updated to ensure safety.
- Restrict and monitor access based on the principle of least privilege, Using protected branches and merge request approval requirements to impose restrictions on critical projects is a way to ensure compliance standards are met.
Scaling for the future
Fatima Sarah Khalid: Supporting updates with AI-assisted code will enable more sleep!
The future of DevSecOps involves automating software delivery pipelines and returning focus to the fundamental (often complex) problem you’re trying to solve for your organization.
A platform that helps us reduce the number of tools we manage and automate some of our DevSecOps processes helps us achieve our goals.
Looking back at my time at City Hall with multiple projects, legacy code, and kiosks, today’s software development tools have helped teams work to create more streamlined and efficient applications for city services. See how much impact you can make.
Automating software delivery would have allowed us to spend less time troubleshooting code and more time improving the user experience and serving our constituents. DevSecOps is more than just a tool, it’s about enabling all team members to participate and contribute their expertise to the software development process.
Plus… get some extra sleep the morning of the mayor’s speech. This is because real-time updates of speeches on websites are not as stressful as they used to be.
