Q6. Establish a change management process

Change management, as a form of process discipline, is intended to reduce the business risk arising from the unintended consequences of uncoordinated modification to the configuration of an application. Change management certainly needs to be considered in the context of the cloud, because changes there are easy and they happen frequently.

The goals of change management are the same for applications deployed in the cloud, but it may need to be optimized for the higher frequency and smaller scope of individual changes we recommend here. It is imperative to avoid the anti-pattern of formal change management processes that can become more cumbersome than the changes themselves.

One approach to change management that works in concert with other recommended practices is to:

1. Perform configuration changes using code^Q3
2. Make configuration changes that are incremental, articulable, and reversible^Q4
3. Automate changes using CI/CD^Q5, with appropriate tests and validation steps in the pipeline.