The SDLC compliance surface: what federal frameworks actually require from your build pipeline

The text provides an in-depth examination of federal compliance frameworks relevant to the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), detailing how these frameworks, such as EO 14028, NIST SSDF, DISA STIGs, CMMC, FedRAMP, FISMA, and ITAR, impose specific requirements on the development, testing, scanning, packaging, and deployment of software. These frameworks, while differing in scope and specificity, overlap significantly in their demands for SBOM generation, security scanning, container hardening, build provenance, secret management, version control, and continuous evidence collection. The article emphasizes the importance of automating these compliance processes for platform teams in defense technology companies and federal software vendors, noting that frameworks like EO 14028 and the NIST SSDF are particularly aimed at software producers selling to the federal government. It highlights that these requirements can be addressed through tools like Earthly Lunar, which provides automated guardrails for compliance, ensuring that standards are met as part of the development process, thus reducing the operational burden of manual compliance.