The DevOps movement promised faster delivery, better quality, and improved collaboration. For many organisations, it delivered. But critical infrastructure and regulated environments often struggle to adopt DevOps practices—the constraints seem incompatible with the philosophy.
They're not. You just need a different approach.
The Apparent Conflict
Standard DevOps assumes:
- Rapid iteration and frequent deployment
- Automated testing and continuous integration
- Infrastructure as code and self-service provisioning
- Blameless post-mortems and learning from failure
Regulated environments typically require:
- Formal change control and approval processes
- Extensive documentation and audit trails
- Segregation of duties between development and operations
- Zero tolerance for production failures
These seem fundamentally opposed. But the conflict is often more apparent than real.
What Regulators Actually Want
Most regulatory frameworks don't prohibit automation—they require control, traceability, and accountability. Automated deployments with proper controls can actually provide better compliance than manual processes:
Traceability: Automated pipelines create perfect audit trails. Every change is logged, traceable to a commit, linked to an approval.
Consistency: Automated deployments are repeatable. Manual deployments introduce variation and human error.
Segregation: Pipeline controls can enforce approval gates, prevent self-approval, and maintain separation of duties—often more reliably than manual processes.
Documentation: Infrastructure as code is self-documenting. The code is the documentation, always current, always accurate.
The key is demonstrating that automated controls meet regulatory intent, not just following the letter of legacy procedures.
Adapting CI/CD for Regulated Environments
Continuous integration works in regulated environments with some adaptations:
Approval gates: Pipelines pause at defined points for manual approval. Automated testing runs, results are reviewed, qualified approvers sign off before proceeding.
Environment progression: Changes flow through environments—dev, test, staging, production—with increasing controls at each stage. Early environments allow rapid iteration; later stages require formal approval.
Evidence collection: Pipelines automatically collect compliance evidence—test results, security scans, approval records, deployment logs. This becomes the compliance package for auditors.
Immutable artifacts: Build once, deploy everywhere. The same tested artifact moves through environments, eliminating "works on my machine" issues and ensuring consistency.
Rollback capability: Automated rollback for failed deployments. This actually reduces risk compared to manual "fix forward" approaches.
Infrastructure as Code in Air-Gapped Environments
Air-gapped and classified environments create specific challenges:
No external package registries: Dependencies must be vendored, mirrored internally, or built from source. This requires investment but improves supply chain security.
No cloud-based CI/CD: Self-hosted runners, on-premises Git servers, internal artifact repositories. The tooling exists; it just needs local deployment.
Offline testing: Security scanning, dependency checking, and compliance verification must work without internet connectivity.
Media-based deployment: Final deployment may involve physical media transfer. Pipelines can generate deployment packages for media transfer with integrity verification.
Our infraPatterns platform is designed for these constraints—patterns that deploy consistently whether the target is cloud-connected or completely air-gapped.
Change Control Integration
Formal change control isn't incompatible with automation:
Change records from commits: Git commits link to change requests. The change control record becomes metadata in the pipeline.
Automated CAB preparation: Pipelines generate change summaries, risk assessments, and rollback procedures for Change Advisory Board review.
Scheduled deployment windows: Pipelines respect deployment windows, queuing approved changes for execution during permitted times.
Emergency change procedures: Break-glass processes for urgent changes, with appropriate logging and post-hoc approval.
The goal is making change control easier to follow correctly than to bypass. Automation should reduce friction for compliant changes, not add bureaucratic overhead.
Security Scanning Integration
Regulated environments often require security assessment before deployment:
Static analysis: Code scanning for vulnerabilities, secrets, and compliance issues. Block merges that fail security checks.
Dependency scanning: Known vulnerability detection in dependencies. Automated alerts and remediation tracking.
Container scanning: Image vulnerability assessment before deployment. Enforce base image standards and patch requirements.
Infrastructure scanning: Terraform/CloudFormation security analysis. Catch misconfigurations before they reach production.
These scans should be automated, fast, and integrated into developer workflow. Slow, manual security reviews create pressure to bypass controls.
Cultural Adaptation
Technical changes are easier than cultural ones. Regulated environments often have cultures of caution that resist DevOps adoption:
Start small: Pilot DevOps approaches in lower-risk areas. Demonstrate success before expanding.
Involve compliance early: Bring auditors and compliance teams into pipeline design. They're more likely to accept controls they helped create.
Quantify improvement: Track deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, and time to recovery. Show that DevOps practices improve rather than compromise reliability.
Maintain safety valves: Keep manual deployment capability for genuine emergencies. This reduces resistance from teams worried about losing control.
The Path Forward
DevOps in regulated environments isn't about abandoning controls—it's about implementing controls more effectively through automation. Organisations that figure this out gain competitive advantage: faster delivery without compromising compliance.
Those that treat DevOps and regulation as fundamentally incompatible will find themselves increasingly unable to compete with organisations that have resolved this apparent tension.