SEC540: Cloud Native Security and DevSecOps Automation

This section introduces DevOps practices by analyzing and securing a vulnerable Version Control and Continuous Integration (CI) system, teaching students to configure AI agents that help identify risks and run DevOps tools that harden workflows, automate code analysis, and securely manage secrets.

In section two, students deploy cloud infrastructure with Terraform, harden network configurations, automate configuration management with Packer and Ansible, and secure container images for Kubernetes by managing misconfigurations, scanning for vulnerabilities, and securing the software supply chain with SBOMs and artifact signing.

In section three, students start by learning the Kubernetes control plane, the kubectl command line interface, and how to use AI to interact with clusters hosted in cloud services like AWS EKS and Azure AKS. Then, harden the cluster using security controls such as RBAC, workload identity, and admission control.

In section four, students learn how security changes with microservices and how to implement centralized microservice security controls. We establish edge authentication and authorization with cloud native tooling, build network policy to govern service to service communication, deploy microservice patches with zero downtime, and enable OpenTelemetry.

In section five, students learn to automate cloud security and Kubernetes compliance, aggregate and correlate vulnerabilities, and implement policy as code to stop deployments and auto remediate configuration drift.