The CVE dropped. The container was in production. CRITICAL severity. Remote code execution. Tagged latest.
Nobody knew which deployments used it. Scanning happened post-push. The flaw lived in production six hours.
This is the pattern that stops CVEs before they reach the registry.
The deployment had no resource limits. Memory leaked. The node crashed. Three pods died.
The developer missed the requirement. Code review missed it. CI passed. Tests skip resource checks.
Admission control stops this. Before etcd. Before production. Before damage.
The email arrived on a Monday. "SOC 2 audit in 30 days. Need evidence of secure development practices."
We had policies. Documentation. Training slides. None of it mattered.
Auditors don't want to hear what you say you do. They want to see what the system forces you to do.
The Terraform config was already committed. Three pull requests deep before anyone noticed. Now it's in git history. Audit logs show violations. The team is explaining how vendor lock-in crept in.
Pre-commit hooks stop this before it starts.
Today marks a milestone. The Adaptive Enforcement Lab documentation site is live, and with it, a year's worth of battle-tested patterns for GitHub App automation finally have a proper home.
This wasn't a sprint. It was an on-and-off effort spanning twelve months, guided by a simple principle: one building block at a time. Atomic habits applied to infrastructure. Some weeks meant solving a single authentication edge case. Others meant no progress at all. The pieces accumulated slowly, each one small enough to ship, test, and trust before moving on.
Then came today. A marathon session to wire everything together. The discovery stage that had been working in isolation. The distribution logic refined over months of incremental improvements. The idempotency patterns born from countless failed reruns. Today was assembly day. I took a year of atomic improvements and built the complete content distribution system.
This post covers that journey from "let's automate some file syncing" to "we need enterprise-grade security for 40 repositories."