Right-Sized DevSecOps: How Tooling Complexity Breaks Modern Pipelines

Many organizations practicing DevSecOps have collapsed under the weight of their own tooling. These organizations tried to solve delivery problems by stacking Kubernetes, Helm, GitOps controllers, scanners, and templating systems until no one can explain their own deployment path. This webcast cuts through that complexity and shows how right-sizing DevSecOps—reproducible environments, deterministic builds, type-safe configuration, and small iterative releases—restores velocity and reliability. We focus on what high-stakes teams actually need, not what vendors or compliance frameworks prescribe.

What Will Attendees Learn?

• Why complexity, not capability, is the primary barrier to fast, secure delivery

• How reproducibility, pre-rendering, and type-safe configuration eliminate entire categories of deployment failure

• How to design a “paved road” that scales across teams without drowning them in tooling

• How to move from episodic, end-state-driven integration to continuous, incremental delivery

Who Should Attend?

• DevSecOps and platform engineers

• Software engineering leads and architects

• Security engineers embedded in delivery or cloud-native workflows

• Technical program managers responsible for release processes

About the Speakers

Joseph Yankel is the initiative lead of the DevSecOps Innovations team at the SEI. His team works shoulder to shoulder with innovators to adapt modern ways of delivering software across the Department of War (DoW). The team collaborates broadly to rapidly, dependably, and securely deliver software-driven capability that meet evolving mission needs to maintain and expand strategic advantage. Yankel regularly engages with various aspects of the software industry as a QA engineer, software engineer, network security engineer, and team leader. He prioritizes taking on big challenges to continually learn and improve and collaborating to deliver impactful work. At Carnegie Mellon University, Yankel is an adjunct faculty member in the School of Computer Science’s Executive Education program. A former Marine, Yankel gives back to the Department of War through fulfilling the SEI's mission.

David Shepard is a senior engineer in the Software Solutions Division at the SEI. David has made a career of working in many different areas of the information technology field. He has spent time building networks, administering servers, designing software, writing and debugging software, working on process improvement initiatives, auditing application security, implementing big data and machine learning systems, assisting digital forensic investigations, and researching and implementing DevSecOps solutions. He has worked in corporate, education, and government sectors for large institutions, mid-sized companies, and start-ups on projects with budgets that range in size from tens of thousands to tens of millions of dollars. In his ten years with the SEI, he has spent significant effort working on research but is an engineer at heart.

Vaughn Coates is an associate DevOps engineer in the Software Solutions Division at the SEI. Vaughn works at the intersection of strategy, security, and engineering. His work architecting secure software solutions drives decision making and brings clarity and structure to ambiguity. With an approach that is both results driven and holistic, he ensures solutions are not only effective, but they also resonate with the people they’re meant to serve.