Secure automation of CI/CD pipelines for cloud infrastructures

The transition to cloud-native applications and microservices architectures significantly increases the complexity of software build, security, and deployment. This work presents the design and implementation of an automated and secure CI/CD pipeline for a training management application deployed on Microsoft Azure. The architecture combines Jenkins for continuous integration, SonarQube for static analysis and quality controls, Trivy for container image vulnerability scanning, Docker for containerization, Azure Kubernetes Service for orchestration, and Argo CD for continuous deployment following the GitOps paradigm. The evaluation was conducted in a controlled academic environment. Forty-five consecutive pipeline executions were analyzed. The observed success rate was 95.6%, with two failures deliberately introduced to verify the operation of quality and security gates. The end-to-end pipeline duration was approximately 12 to 15 min. The approximately 87.5% reduction reported in the study should be interpreted as a comparison with the estimated duration of manual deployments performed during the project, rather than as a formally instrumented experimental baseline. The results primarily demonstrate the feasibility, traceability, and reproducibility of a workflow integrating CI, DevSecOps, and GitOps; they should not be generalized to large-scale industrial environments without further validation.