Description

A focused course, tailored for you

The Full-Stack Developer's Audit-Ready CI/CD Playbook

Wire SOC 2, ISO 27001, and SBOM evidence straight into the pipeline you already ship from, no extra tooling stack.

Your CI/CD pipeline already does 70 percent of what an auditor wants. The other 30 percent is a handful of steps that nobody told you to add, and they take a week to retrofit after the audit scope letter arrives.

$199 one-time

Tailored to your situation. Access within 24 hours. 30-day money-back.

Includes a hand-built implementation playbook delivered alongside course access, generated for your specific situation.

Why this course

Full-stack developers who own application flow and deployment carry an evidence problem nobody flagged in the job description. The build runs. The tests pass. The deploy goes out. Then someone in the security or compliance function asks for the signed-commit history, the SBOM for the version in production, the dependency scan from the last release, the approval record on the production push, the access log for who touched the prod database. None of that is in the pipeline by default. Adding it after the fact means reconstructing weeks of history from log fragments. Adding it as part of how the pipeline runs costs a one-time setup and then disappears into the background. The course is the second path, written for a developer who is already comfortable with GitHub Actions or GitLab CI or similar, not a security engineer who has never opened a workflow file.

What you walk away with

Ship every release with a signed commit chain and an SBOM artefact attached.
Capture dependency-scan and secret-scan output as durable build artefacts, not just job logs.
Build a production deploy approval gate that produces a record an auditor can read.
Tag every release with change-management metadata that closes a change ticket automatically.
Hand a SOC 2 or ISO 27001 evidence request to a security lead and have them find what they need in the pipeline, not in your inbox.

The 12 modules

Module 1. What an auditor actually wants from a CI/CD pipeline

The 12 questions a SOC 2 or ISO 27001 auditor asks about how code reaches production, translated from control language into the workflow steps and artefacts they map to. Sets the scope for the rest of the course and shows which of the questions your current pipeline already answers and which it does not.

Module 2. Signed commits, signed tags, signed releases

Configuring commit signing for the team, enforcing it as a branch protection rule, attaching the same signature chain to release tags, and producing a verification step in the build job that fails the pipeline if the signature does not match. Includes the GPG and Sigstore variants and notes when each fits.

Module 3. SBOM generation in the build job

Generating a CycloneDX or SPDX software bill of materials as part of the build, attaching it to the release artefact, storing it in a location that survives log rotation, and surfacing the diff between the previous release's SBOM and the new one. Templates for Node, Python, Go, and JVM build steps.

Module 4. Dependency and vulnerability scanning that produces durable evidence

Running the dependency scan as a build step, capturing the output as a structured artefact rather than a job log, defining the severity threshold that fails the build, and producing a per-release vulnerability summary that an auditor can sample from. Covers the open-source scanners and the trade-offs between them.

Module 5. Secret scanning before merge, not after

Pre-commit hooks for local detection, a pull-request scan that blocks merge on a finding, the suppression workflow when a scanner flags a false positive, and the audit log that records every suppression with a reviewer and a reason. The goal is zero secrets in the repo, zero secrets in build artefacts, and a clean answer when an auditor asks how you know.

Module 6. Deploy approval gates that produce a record

Building a production deploy step that requires a named approver, capturing the approver identity and timestamp as workflow metadata, exposing the approval record through the platform's deployment history API, and connecting the record back to the change ticket that authorised the work. The approval is enforced in the pipeline, not on a wiki page nobody reads.

Module 7. Change-management metadata on every release

Tagging every release with the change ticket reference, the approver, the reviewer, and a one-line description of what changed. Auto-closing the change ticket when the deploy succeeds. Producing the per-release change record that an auditor sees as one row in a table, not as a thread of Slack messages.

Module 8. Production access logging from the application side

Instrumenting the application to log every privileged action, every administrative endpoint hit, every database operation that touches customer data, with the actor, the timestamp, and the request context. Forwarding the log to a destination that retains it for the period the framework requires. The shape of the log line that makes sample testing easy.

Module 9. Infrastructure-as-code review and drift detection

Making every infra change a pull request, running a plan step on the PR, requiring a reviewer who is not the author, and running a drift-detection job on a schedule to catch out-of-band changes to production infra. The evidence record an auditor wants from the IaC side and where the pipeline already produces it.

Module 10. The release notes file as an audit artefact

Generating release notes automatically from PR metadata, structuring them so the security-relevant changes are tagged distinctly, attaching the notes to the release, and using the same file as the source of truth for the change ticket and the customer-facing changelog. One artefact, three audiences.

Module 11. Backup, restore, and disaster-recovery evidence from the pipeline

Scheduling a restore-from-backup job that actually runs against a non-production environment on a cadence, capturing the success or failure as a durable artefact, and producing the once-a-quarter evidence record that the framework requires without anyone having to remember to run a manual test.

Module 12. Hand the pipeline to a SOC 2 or ISO 27001 lead

The walk-through of the instrumented pipeline you give to whoever runs the audit on your side. The artefacts they need to find, where to find them, what to do when the auditor asks for a sample, and the one-page summary that lets the conversation finish in a meeting rather than a month-long thread.

How this addresses your situation

Specific modules that map to what you said you are dealing with.

First production audit landing on the team and the pipeline has to be ready before scope letter day.

Security lead asking for SBOMs and the answer has to be a working build step, not a manual export.

Customer security questionnaire asking how change management works and the answer has to point at the pipeline.

Renewal of a SOC 2 Type 2 where the sample period is about to start and the gaps in evidence have to close now.

What you get with this course

12 written modules in the Art of Service learning environment.
Reference workflow files for GitHub Actions and GitLab CI covering every module's evidence step.
SBOM, dependency-scan, and secret-scan job templates for Node, Python, Go, and JVM stacks.
Release-notes and change-ticket metadata templates ready to drop into an existing repo.
The hand-built implementation playbook tuned to the stack and platform you describe in the welcome form.
Account provisioned and playbook delivered within 24 hours of purchase.

What you will have in hand by Day 1, Week 1, Month 1

Within 24 hours your account in the learning environment is provisioned and the tailored implementation playbook is delivered alongside it.

Modules 1 to 4 cover the build-job evidence and can be wired into an existing pipeline in a single afternoon.

Modules 5 to 8 cover deploy-time and runtime evidence and typically land over the following week.

Modules 9 to 12 cover infrastructure, release notes, restore evidence, and the audit hand-off, sized for completion across the second and third week.

Before and after

Before

Pipeline ships clean builds, evidence requests trigger a week of log archaeology, audit conversations stall on what the team cannot reconstruct after the fact.

After

Every release produces signed commits, an SBOM, scan artefacts, an approval record, and change metadata as a side effect of the normal build. Evidence requests resolve in a single message pointing at the artefact location.

What happens if you do not address this

The first production audit, the first enterprise customer questionnaire, or the first regulator request will demand artefacts the pipeline does not produce today. Building them retroactively costs days of work per gap and produces evidence with weaker integrity than artefacts captured at the time of the build.

Who it is for

A full-stack developer who designs application flow, builds backend logic, and owns the CI/CD pipeline through to deployment. Comfortable in YAML workflow files. Has shipped to production. Has not yet been the person on the receiving end of a SOC 2 evidence request or a Type 2 sample period, but suspects that conversation is coming and would rather wire the pipeline now than reconstruct it under deadline.

Who this is NOT for. Compliance auditors looking for a control-by-control crosswalk. Security engineers who already run a dedicated DevSecOps platform. Developers who have not yet shipped a production deploy, the course assumes you already have a pipeline to instrument.

How it arrives

Text-based course in the Art of Service learning environment, plus downloadable workflow templates and worked examples for every module, plus the hand-built implementation playbook delivered alongside course access.

Time investment. Roughly 30 to 40 minutes per module of reading, plus an hour or two per module if you wire the example workflow into your own repo as you go. Total commitment lands around 10 to 14 hours across two to three weeks.

Why $199 is the right number

A DevSecOps SaaS platform solves the same problem with a vendor footprint, a per-seat cost, and a tooling stack to learn. A consulting engagement solves it with a one-off report that goes stale the moment the pipeline changes. This course solves it inside the workflow files you already own, so the evidence steps live next to the build steps and stay current as the pipeline evolves.

FAQ

Do I need to be on GitHub Actions specifically?

No. Templates are provided for GitHub Actions and GitLab CI. The concepts map to CircleCI, Buildkite, and Azure Pipelines and the implementation playbook is built against whichever platform you list in the welcome form.

Will this make my pipeline slower?

Most steps add seconds, not minutes. SBOM generation and dependency scanning are the heaviest and the course shows how to cache and parallelise them so a typical pipeline lands within 10 to 20 percent of its current runtime.

Do I need to be a security engineer to follow this?

No. The course is written for a full-stack developer who already owns the pipeline. Security concepts are introduced where they map to a pipeline step, not as background theory.

What if I am not the person who runs the audit?

Module 12 is the hand-off conversation. The artefacts produced by the rest of the course are exactly what whoever runs the audit on your side needs to receive.

Is there a refund if it does not fit my stack?

30 days, no questions, full refund.

30-day money-back guarantee. If after a week of working through the materials this is not what you needed, reply to the receipt email and a full refund is processed. No questions, no forms.

Within 24 hours your account in the learning environment is provisioned and the tailored implementation playbook is delivered alongside it.