Rootconf 2025 Annual Conference CfP

Abstract
In this session, I’ll share the transformative CI/CD journey we undertook within the Enterprise project.
An ecosystem of over 200 Java7 based legacy services, hosted across VMware managed VMs in the US and Europe. These services were tightly governed by InfoSec and Compliance constraints, making any change a significant challenge.

Our goal was to modernize the software delivery process without disrupting ongoing operations, while also drastically improving the developer experience. We implemented an industry standard CI/CD pipeline using GitLab, Gradle (with Java toolchain), SonarQube, Fortify, Mend, and JFrog Artifactory. Shifting from monolithic, brittle processes to a streamlined, scalable, and secure pipeline.

I’ll walk through how we approached:

• Transitioning from diverged SVN to Git branches to a trunk based development model.
• Replacing a heavily customized Gradle 1.9 setup with modern Gradle, ensuring compatibility across Java versions.
• Standardizing security scanning workflows using SAST, SCA, and CVE tools, integrated directly into CI pipelines.
• Migrating artifact handling to standard JFrog CLI workflows, abandoning custom scripts.
• Leveraging GitLab Environments and Ansible for auditable, approval-based deployments.

This talk will provide realworld insights into how a highly constrained, enterprise scale setup can adopt modern DevOps principles and tools, empowering developers and increasing delivery confidence.

Key Takeaways:

• How to drive CI/CD modernization in environments constrained by legacy tooling and strict compliance rules.
• Strategies for implementing trunk based development and artifact promotion pipelines.
• Lessons learned from integrating security tooling and policy based scan gates.
• Balancing developer autonomy with control using GitLab environments and Ansible.
• Building a “single serve” model where services are independently owned and deployed.

Intended Audience:

• DevOps engineers, platform teams, and architects dealing with legacy modernization
• Engineering leaders seeking to improve developer experience in high compliance environments
• Anyone looking to learn from large scale CI/CD transformations

About Myself

• Been in the tech industry for around 10 years. Solving some amazing challenges around Networks, Backend systems, Automations and SRE practices.
• Exploring permaculture as a hobby