I've got a daily CI/CD pipeline that uses Terraform and Kubernetes for deployments. While we've set up some infrastructure as code (IaC) linting and container scanning, it seems like every new security check we add ends up slowing down our deployment cycles. Security teams want more comprehensive coverage, but the developers are pushed for time and feel frustrated when scans add minutes to their workflow. How do you all find the balance between maintaining speed and ensuring security? Has anyone successfully integrated CI/CD security without compromising velocity?
5 Answers
If you're not deploying constantly, an additional minute for security scans generally shouldn't be a deal-breaker. It might help to rethink your deployment strategy, as using Terraform with Kubernetes might not serve you well. Tools like FluxCD or ArgoCD can offer smoother deployments with curated images.
We've adopted a tiered approach to security checks. For non-sensitive changes, we run lighter scans, but anything that touches network or IAM gets a full security review. This helps maintain speed while still keeping an eye on risk.
Are you running your jobs in parallel? Security scans should ideally finish before other tests if set up correctly. For us, we found that our security checks took less time than some of our other tests, so there was no added delay.
One way to keep your CI/CD pipeline quick is to run security checks on pull requests instead of the deployment itself. This way, your deployment pipeline can remain lean and focus on vetted code. Make sure your security checks are parallelized, too – they shouldn't block each other. If one job fails, let the others complete so developers can fix multiple issues at once, instead of addressing them one by one.
Exactly! It's all about optimizing your workflow. Separating different types of checks allows the pipeline to finish earlier, which is a huge win for everyone.
This approach is spot-on! Too many companies just pile on checks, making everything slower – we need to get smarter about how we do it.
Security should never be compromised, but you also don’t want developers sitting idle while waiting for checks to finish. Encourage them to do their own scans before merge requests—this way, they're already addressing potential issues without blaming the security checks.
Totally agree! Switching to parallel execution was a game-changer for us. The overall speed increased while still maintaining security checks.