This article is based on reporting originally published by GCN.com and covers eGlobalTech’s DevOps Factory framework and its use at U.S. federal agencies.
Overview: DevOps for Federal Government
Delivering software quickly inside the U.S. federal government is notoriously difficult. Agencies must satisfy a dense web of compliance obligations — FedRAMP, FISMA, NIST SP 800-53, and agency-specific systems development lifecycle (SDLC) requirements — before any workload can reach production. eGlobalTech, a federal IT services firm, built its DevOps Factory framework specifically to reconcile agile delivery speed with those compliance demands.
After roughly a year of pilot testing at agencies including the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), eGlobalTech made DevOps Factory broadly available to the public sector.
What Is DevOps Factory?
DevOps Factory is an end-to-end framework and toolchain designed to move federal agencies from idea to production release as quickly and securely as possible. According to Rajiv Kadayam, Senior Director of Technology Strategy at eGlobalTech:
“The ultimate core objective of DevOps Factory is the rapid transformation of nascent business ideas and requirements into functioning production release offerings.”
The framework was explicitly designed to align with federal policies and standards, including:
- SDLC deliverables — structured lifecycle documentation and governance checkpoints
- FedRAMP — the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program for cloud security authorizations
- FISMA — the Federal Information Security Management Act
- NIST SP 800-53 — the security and privacy control catalog for federal information systems
The goal is to give agencies security and flexibility while enabling them to “continuously iterate and scale with changing business needs,” Kadayam said.
Two Core Components: Espial and Cloudamatic
Espial: Shift-Left Penetration Testing
One of the most distinctive elements of DevOps Factory is Espial, a tool that automates and integrates penetration testing directly into the CI/CD pipeline. Traditional federal IT projects often defer penetration testing to an independent third party immediately before deployment — a practice that surfaces vulnerabilities far too late to fix cheaply.
Espial shifts that testing left, triggering early detection and remediation during development rather than at deployment gates. As Kadayam explained:
“Rather than having penetration testing done right before deployment by an independent third party — we still have that — we wanted to have early visibility to those issues that are typical in a web application project. We want to be able to detect those issues early in the process, and this tool helps us to do just that.”
Importantly, Espial does not replace the independent third-party assessment required for FedRAMP authorization — it supplements it by catching common web application vulnerabilities continuously throughout the development cycle.
Cloudamatic: Cloud Deployment Automation
Espial works alongside Cloudamatic, which eGlobalTech launched in 2016. Cloudamatic is compatible with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure and accelerates the automatic deployment of secure applications onto cloud platforms by handling:
- Provisioning and configuring cloud infrastructure
- Orchestrating complex, multi-component software configurations
- Managing virtual private cloud (VPC) topologies and security group/firewall settings
- Interconnecting systems across agency boundaries
Much of this orchestration happens behind the scenes, allowing developers to focus on writing and pushing code while the platform handles the complex infrastructure engineering underneath.
Real-World Results: HHS and FEMA
HHS: Cloud Release Times Cut from Hours to Minutes
At the Department of Health and Human Services, DevOps Factory reduced the time required to release workloads to the cloud from four to five hours down to approximately 30 minutes, according to Kadayam. This order-of-magnitude improvement in deployment speed is a direct result of automating provisioning and compliance checks that previously required manual intervention.
FEMA: Scalable Geospatial Disaster Management
At FEMA, the use case is more operationally critical. DevOps Factory supports a cloud-based geospatial disaster management environment used by all FEMA regions, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the Department of Homeland Security to coordinate responses to natural disasters. The platform enables users to publish and consume geo-coded data in near real time.
Elastic scalability is essential here. As Kadayam noted: “When an emergency happens, usage really spikes.” The platform must absorb sudden, unpredictable surges in demand — a scenario where manual infrastructure management would be untenable.
eGlobalTech also implemented a fully electronic change management process for FEMA developers using Jira (Atlassian’s issue-tracking tool), giving developers visibility into appeals and recordkeeping without the overhead of document-heavy, meeting-intensive approval workflows.
Security by Design: FedRAMP and FISMA Compliance
Because eGlobalTech supported FedRAMP from the framework’s inception, it was able to bake security and compliance directly into the DevOps Factory architecture rather than bolting them on afterward. This “security by design” approach includes:
- Automated enforcement of NIST SP 800-53 security controls
- Continuous compliance monitoring integrated into the CI/CD pipeline via Espial
- Electronic audit trails and governance records to satisfy FISMA documentation requirements
- Support for multi-VPC architectures with segmented security and firewall configurations
As Kadayam described it, the goal is to make traditionally paper-heavy compliance processes electronic: “Our approach is to be able to make a lot of those more and more electronic.”
Who Is DevOps Factory For?
DevOps Factory targets agile developers within federal agencies who need to push code changes to development and testing environments independently, without waiting on manual infrastructure or compliance processes. The framework gives those developers a self-service experience while the platform automates the complex, regulated engineering happening underneath — orchestrating deployments, managing cloud networking, and maintaining compliance posture continuously.
The framework’s flexibility is a deliberate design choice. As Kadayam put it: “The idea of DevOps Factory is to provide flexibility to agencies” in meeting their specific systems engineering and development lifecycle guidelines.
Key Takeaways
- Compliance and speed are not mutually exclusive — with the right automation, federal agencies can achieve both.
- Shift-left security testing (Espial) surfaces vulnerabilities during development, reducing costly late-stage remediation without replacing required independent assessments.
- Cloud deployment automation (Cloudamatic) handles complex multi-cloud provisioning, freeing developers from infrastructure toil.
- Electronic change management using tools like Jira can replace document-heavy governance workflows without sacrificing auditability.
- Elastic scalability is operationally critical for government systems that must respond to unpredictable demand spikes, such as disaster response platforms.
Original reporting by GCN.com. All quoted statements are attributed to Rajiv Kadayam, Senior Director of Technology Strategy at eGlobalTech, as reported by GCN.