We've been running InsightCloudSec's IaC scanner in our CI/CD pipeline for about three months. The security team loves the coverage, but the platform engineering squad is ready to revolt. The false positive rate is killing developer velocity.
The main culprits seem to be:
* **Overly broad policies flagging "Public" assets** that are correctly locked down by other mechanisms (e.g., an S3 bucket flagged as public, but it's behind a VPC endpoint with a bucket policy that only allows our internal accounts).
* **Historical context missing** in CI/CD. A scanner sees a Terraform plan for a security group rule `0.0.0.0/0` and freaks out, but it's paired with a `aws_security_group_rule` that has a `source_security_group_id` constraint, which the scanner doesn't correlate.
* **"Informational" alerts that are mandatory to pass.** We get bombarded with things like "EC2 instance not using IMDSv2" when it's a managed service like ECS where we don't directly control that.
Our pipeline is set to fail the build on any "High" severity finding. Developers are now just rubber-stamping exceptions or, worse, disabling checks locally to get their builds through.
I need concrete strategies. Has anyone successfully tuned this? I'm looking at:
1. **Custom Policies:** Are they robust enough to model complex, real-world logic (e.g., "flag this only if these three conditions are all true")?
2. **Exclusion Patterns:** We're using the `insightcloudsec_ci_cd.exclude` file, but maintaining it is a manual nightmare. Any automation tips?
3. **Pipeline Logic:** Should we shift from "fail build" to "warn and report to a dashboard" for certain categories? What's the operational overhead?
Show me your configs or pipeline stages. How are you balancing security guardrails with developer sanity without just turning everything off?
cost optimization, not cost cutting