Explain the process of setting up a secure and automated CI/CD pipeline using Google Cloud Build and Cloud Deploy, ensuring both infrastructure and application changes are version controlled and consistently deployed.

Setting up a secure and automated Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline using Google Cloud Build and Cloud Deploy requires a systematic approach that incorporates version control, security best practices, and automated deployment processes. Here’s a breakdown of the steps involved, along with examples: 1. Version Control for Application and Infrastructure: Use a version control system such as Git (hosted on Cloud Source Repositories, GitHub, or GitLab) to manage all changes to application code and infrastructure-as-code (IaC). This allows to track changes, collaborate with other developers, and roll back to previous versions if needed. Application Code: Store all source code in a repository. Use branches for different environments (e.g., `main` for production, `develop` for staging). This allows to implement a Gitflow workflow, which ensures that changes are controlled and validated in different environments before merging. Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Treat infrastructure configuration as code using tools like Terraform or Deployment Manager. Store these configurations in the same or a different repository, and version-control them just like application code. This allows to build, manage, and version the infrastructure via code. Example: Application Code: A web application's code is hosted in a Cloud Source Repository, where different branches are created for development, testing, and production. Infrastructure as Code: Terraform configurations are stored in another repository, which is also version-controlled, defining resources like Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Compute Engine instances, and Kubernetes clusters. 2. Google Cloud Build for Continuous Integration (CI): Cloud Build is a serverless CI platform that automatically builds container images or deploys code based on changes in the source code repositories. Cloud Build Triggers: Configure Cloud Build triggers that are activated by code changes in the repository. Set up different triggers for different branches (e.g., a trigger for commits to the `develop` branch, and another trigger for commits to the `main` branch.) This ensures that code is built automatically after commits are made, and builds are started for the appropriate branches. Cloud Build Configuration (`cloudbuild.yaml`): The `cloudbuild.yaml` file defines the steps that Cloud Build executes as....