Building a Secure Code Delivery Platform

Overview →1. The Source of Truth →2. Control Plane Architecture →3. GitLab Governance →4. Paved-Road CI →5. Infrastructure Governance with HCP Terraform →6. Runner Isolation on EKS →7. Monitoring →8. Supply Chain and SRE →Conclusion →

This guide explains how to design a secure code delivery platform using GitLab, HCP Terraform, AWS EKS, policy-as-code, supply chain evidence, and SRE practices.

It is written for readers who may be new to platform engineering, DevOps, or software supply chain security. The first page introduces the vocabulary and the overall shape of the platform. The rest of the guide builds the platform one layer at a time.

Guide path

1. Overview introduces platform engineering, DevOps, GitLab, CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, runner isolation, and supply chain security.
2. The Source of Truth explains why the platform starts with reviewable code instead of manual settings.
3. Control Plane Architecture shows how GitLab, HCP Terraform, policy checks, and EKS divide responsibility.
4. GitLab Governance turns repositories, merge requests, permissions, and security policies into a delivery baseline.
5. Paved-Road CI builds a reusable pipeline path that teams can extend without removing required controls.
6. Infrastructure Governance with HCP Terraform explains how infrastructure changes are planned, reviewed, checked, and applied.
7. Runner Isolation on EKS treats CI jobs as untrusted workloads that need clear trust tiers.
8. Monitoring covers EKS cluster health, runner metrics, GitLab delivery metrics, alerts, SLOs, and runbooks.
9. Supply Chain and SRE closes the loop with provenance, signing, SBOMs, SLOs, runbooks, and ongoing review.
10. Conclusion summarizes the full platform and how the moving pieces fit together.

The guide is intentionally practical. It does not try to describe every possible enterprise integration. It focuses on the decisions that make a secure delivery platform understandable, repeatable, and operable.