KICS GitLab CI/CD Pipeline Template
A GitLab CI/CD pipeline template for scanning infrastructure as code with KICS. Ready-to-use job or extendable hidden base job.
tobias@dolfen.me:~$ whoami
Senior DevOps Engineer at TWT. I automate infrastructure so developers can ship fast and reliably.
About
I'm a DevOps engineer with a full-stack background and over six years of experience building automated, scalable systems. My focus is infrastructure as code and CI/CD, working with Terraform, GitLab and Ansible in cloud-native environments.
I started out as a software engineer, kept gravitating toward pipelines, servers and monitoring, and noticed automation was where I could make the biggest difference for my team. I've specialized in DevOps ever since.
- Role
- DevOps Engineer @ TWT
- Location
- Germany
- Focus
- IaC, CI/CD, Cloud
- In IT since
- 2018
Experience
Apprenticeship @ TWT
This marks my beginning in the world of IT. I started out as a regular Web Developer.
WebDeveloper @ TWT
I successfully finished my apprenticeship and was hired as a WebDeveloper with a focus on DevOps. My main responsibilities were to automate deployments and configuring servers and their software, but I also did some full-stack development, as I was needed in this field too.
Full-Dive into DevOps
As we grew, I was given the opportunity to fully dive into the DevOps field. I was responsible for our CI/CD pipelines, which included writing the pipelines, configuring the runners, and maintaining the GitLab instance. The two later points were only temporary, as we later combined our companies different GitLab instances into one. I also overtook the role of configuring our monitoring servers and maintaining them, including a preview server for our customers. Lastly, I overtook the role of DevOps for one of our customers, which needed help with their infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines in Azure & Azure DevOps.
Code quality and testing
After I took some time to accommodate myself to the new responsibilities, I took a look at our code quality and testing. I implemented multiple code quality checks and linters (e.g. SonarQube, ESLint, PHPStan & PHPCS) and established baseline testing jobs for our different applications. This was a big step for our company, as we had many different projects with different requirements and languages. With that, I was able to streamline our developers workflow and make it easier for them to deliver high-quality code.
DevOps Engineer @ TWT
Time for a change! I was promoted to DevOps Engineer and switched departments to support our hosting team. My main responsibilities switched to maintaining our cloud infrastructure & our data center servers, as well as supporting our customers with their infrastructure needs.
IaC & Automation
After adapting to my new found tools and responsibilities, I started to write Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for our cloud infrastructure. I also automated many of our manual processes via ansible playbooks & roles, which saved us a lot of time and made our infrastructure more reliable.
Software, Frameworks & Tools
Since I started my journey in the DevOps field, I have worked with many different tools. But with my new position, I learned to work with many more. Some of the more notable ones are: Terraform, Ansible, GitLab CI/CD, Azure DevOps, Azure, AWS, CheckMK, Docker, GCP, Prometheus, Grafana and many more.
Skills
The tools I reach for daily, and the platforms I've run in production.
Infrastructure as Code
- Terraform
- OpenTofu
- Ansible
- Packer
Cloud
- AWS
- Azure
- Google Cloud
Containers
- Docker
- Kubernetes
CI/CD & Version Control
- GitLab
- Azure DevOps
- GitHub Actions
Monitoring & Alerting
- Prometheus
- Grafana
- CheckMK
Languages
- Go
- Bash
- PHP
- Python
- TypeScript
Projects
Open source I currently maintain.
content_exporter
A Go-based Prometheus exporter to quickly check strings on a website. Supports Basic Auth and Bearer tokens.
Many more were built and discarded along the way. These are the ones I keep alive.
Contact
Always open for a chat about infrastructure, automation, or anything DevOps.