CI/CD & Infrastructure Automation

Overview & Objective

At eigenstudio, studied, extended, and authored cloud infrastructure automation and CI/CD pipelines. The goal was eliminating static cloud credentials, automating deployment workflows, and provisioning AWS resources using Infrastructure as Code (IaC).

🎯 The Problem

• Security Risks of Static Credentials: Storing long-lived AWS IAM secret keys inside CI/CD repositories created major security risks.
• Manual Cloud Setup: Provisioning VPCs, container services, and security rules manually caused configuration drift and slow release cycles.
• Unvalidated Builds: Lack of automated test and container build pipelines led to deployment-time errors.

🛠️ Key Contributions & Infrastructure Setup

• OIDC GitHub-to-AWS Auth: Configured OpenID Connect (OIDC) identity provider federation between GitHub Actions and AWS IAM, eliminating static access keys.
• Terraform Infrastructure as Code: Authored modular HCL configurations for provisioning AWS VPCs, ECS Fargate clusters, API Gateway, WAF, and DynamoDB tables.
• Automated CI/CD Workflows: Created end-to-end GitHub Actions pipelines including automated linting, test suites, multi-stage Docker image builds, and AWS deployments.
• Security & WAF Layering: Provisioned AWS WAF rules in front of API Gateway to protect against common web exploits.

📐 Architecture Diagram

+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
|                        GitHub Repository                          |
|    Commit / PR Trigger -> GitHub Actions Runner Pipelines          |
+---------------------------------+---------------------------------+
                                  |
                      OIDC Token Request (No Key)
                                  v
+---------------------------------+---------------------------------+
|                        AWS STS & IAM Role                         |
|             Exchanges Token for Short-Lived Session               |
+---------------------------------+---------------------------------+
                                  |
                         Terraform Execution
                                  v
+---------------------------------+---------------------------------+
|                      AWS Cloud Infrastructure                     |
|  [ VPC ] -> [ WAF & API Gateway ] -> [ ECS Fargate ] -> [DynamoDB]|
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+

📈 Outcome & Key Metrics

• Zero Static Credentials: 100% elimination of hardcoded AWS IAM secret keys in CI/CD environment variables.
• Automated Deployments: Reduced deployment cycle time from hours to single-click automated pipeline triggers.
• IaC Reproducibility: Complete cloud architecture codified into version-controlled Terraform modules.