Securing Your CI/CD Pipeline: A Beginner’s Guide to Implementing Essential Security Measures

If you take a look at this blog, you’ll see that I’ve begun to tinker with devops quite a bit. If you’ve ever taken the trouble to look me up on LinkedIn, you’ll also see that I’ve had a little history doing security stuff. Given my love of security, the next logical step of my devops journey was to start to look into securing the CI/CD pipeline. My previous posts were some ways that I was able to make my own personal infrastructure easier to maintain while at the same time learning various devops tools. My two previous posts, How to Build a CI/CD Pipeline for Your Database and Automate Your Database Changes with a CI/CD Pipeline, are my attempt at creating a sample pipeline to be used as a basis of my examples. In addition to these articles, I’ve also created some other infrastructure as part of my devops environment. Now let’s secure it! ...

November 16, 2023 · 13 min · Scott

Automate Your Database Changes with a CI/CD Pipeline

I first started talking about building a database CI/DI pipeline in my previous post, How to Build a CI/CD Pipeline for Your Database. That previous post was focused more on the infrastructure that would be managed by the DevOps team. Now I want to focus on efficient database management with CI/CD. In this post, I’m going to setup a very simple repo that will make use of my deployed database. This new repo is going to leverage a popular tool called Liquibase to implement our changes to the database. ...

November 8, 2023 · 10 min · Scott

How to Build a CI/CD Pipeline for Your Database

I thought that it would be a good idea to do a quick blog post on how to build a ci/cd database pipeline. If you’ve been following my blog, you know that I’ve done quite a bit of tinkering with various automation tools. One thing that I’ve found is that automation helps to relieve me of redundant tasks. I’m able to free myself up for other work and try to automate more. Another benefit of automation is that others can leverage what you’ve created. This helps to make sure things are reproducible and consistent. ...

November 6, 2023 · 13 min · Scott

Terraform for Active Directory Testing: A Practical Example

In my current job, I’m one of the local resident Active Directory experts. Granted my knowledge is a little dated on the subject but I can still get around enough as needed. In order to perform testing, we need to spin up test environments for Active Directory and don’t want to maintain a long lived infrastructure for it. I was having to constantly spin these up by hand and thought there had to be a way to create a test active directory with Terraform. I was right! In addition to the active directory, I needed to be able to add member servers and I found this was all possible with Terraform. ...

October 27, 2023 · 13 min · Scott

Terraform Import Made Easy: Conquering Infrastructure Management Complexities

I will admit that I’m quite a bit of a rookie when it comes to Terraform and the whole infrastructure as code scene but I’m learning. One of the most powerful tools I’ve found when trying to convert your current infrastructure into Terraform is the terraform import command. After too many times of doing an import and manually copying information from my state file, I felt there had to be a way to simplify Terraform import. ...

October 22, 2023 · 7 min · Scott