Federated DevOps : A Privacy-Enhanced Model for CI/CD Pipelines in Multi-Tenant Cloud Environments

Abstract

Multi-tenant cloud environments present significant challenges in maintaining data privacy and security while enabling efficient continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) processes. Traditional DevOps models often expose sensitive information across tenant boundaries, creating compliance risks and potential data breaches. This paper introduces a novel federated DevOps model that integrates federated learning principles with GitOps workflows to create privacy-preserving CI/CD pipelines in multi-tenant Kubernetes environments. Our approach leverages Zero Trust architecture, homomorphic encryption, and differential privacy mechanisms to ensure tenant isolation while maintaining operational efficiency. The model addresses critical security concerns including data leakage prevention, privilege escalation mitigation, and secure artifact sharing across tenant boundaries. Through comprehensive evaluation using multi-account AWS EKS environments, we demonstrate significant improvements in compliance adherence to SOC2 and HiTrust standards while reducing security incidents by 73%. The federated DevOps model introduces a paradigm shift from centralized to distributed CI/CD operations, where each tenant maintains computational sovereignty while participating in collaborative development workflows. Our experimental results show that the privacy-enhanced model achieves comparable performance to traditional centralized approaches while providing stronger security guarantees and regulatory compliance.