Designing and Implementing CI/CD/CS Infrastructure Using GitLab On-Prem and Nessus Pro

Introduction

Software delivery speed and security are no longer separate concerns – they must coexist. In this project, we designed and implemented a complete CI/CD/CS pipeline using GitLab self-hosted and Nessus Pro, delivering automated code deployment and continuous security auditing.

This hybrid approach helped development, operations, and security teams collaborate more efficiently – all under one unified platform.

The Challenge

• The organization required a fully on-premises solution (data sovereignty/compliance)
• No existing CI/CD pipelines or deployment automation
• Security scanning was performed manually and post-deployment
• No version control integration with vulnerability management tools
• Needed isolation between environments (dev, test, staging, prod)

The Solution

1. GitLab On-Prem CI/CD Architecture

• Deployed GitLab CE/EE on private infrastructure (with runners in Docker+VM environments)
• GitLab was integrated with:
  • Docker Registry (private)
  • Vault for secrets management
  • GitLab Pages for internal documentation hosting

CI/CD Pipeline Stages:

1. Linting & Static Code Analysis
2. Unit & Integration Testing
3. Build & Artifact Creation
4. Staging Environment Deployments
5. Production Deployments (manual or timed triggers)

2. Continuous Security (CS) with Nessus Pro

• Integrated Nessus Pro scanners into GitLab pipelines:
  • Custom jobs ran targeted vulnerability scans against staging/prod environments
  • Generated automated reports in HTML and JSON
  • Used scan exit codes to block deployments if critical issues were found
• Vulnerability trends tracked per release and per environment
• Scheduled scans for persistent security baselines

3. Infrastructure-as-Code

• Used Ansible + Terraform to:
  • Provision environments across bare metal, VMs, and cloud
  • Automate GitLab runner creation and rotation
  • Version control for pipeline templates and IaC modules

4. Monitoring & Audit

• Dashboards built using:
  • Grafana + Prometheus for CI runner performance and job stats
  • Centralized Nessus scan logs into Elasticsearch
• Internal audit logs stored for compliance & traceability

Results

Conclusion

By unifying GitLab and Nessus Pro in a structured CI/CD/CS pipeline, we created a modern DevSecOps-ready infrastructure that:

• Enables faster, safer software releases
• Blocks vulnerable code from reaching production
• Provides traceability, observability, and compliance reporting

This architecture empowers developers, secops, and infrastructure teams to move faster — without sacrificing control or security.

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