An appropriate Devops toolchain acts as the catalyst for a successful Devops initiative. But, unregulated changes made to DevOps toolchain have been the cause of several service incidents. Change control of tools is an essential element, but it must not affect the release velocity of the product. Let’s take a look at the challenges faced by DevOps teams while implementing change control:

• Several organizations adopt an agile approach and DevOps delivery style, but without the knowledge of how the safeguards should work to protect the business and service quality.
• Software-defined infrastructure is a reality, but many operations organizations haven’t adapted their change practices to reflect these new realities and techniques.
• User services may be disrupted by changes to the setup and scripts of the tools used for deployment, monitoring, and configuration, but operations teams find that their existing change management approach is unsuitable for governing such changes.

In this blog post, we will discuss the three best practices to successfully implement change control for your DevOps toolchain:

Identify the Basic Change Control Preconditions

DevOps teams must identify the following preconditions that are necessary to successfully implement change control in DevOps toolchain:

• The product teams must be full-service teams, delivering built-to-run products. Their responsibilities include building the code, configuring the production environment, ensuring back-out is possible, releasing and deploying the product, and resolving incidents whenever they occur.
• Automation tools are used to allocate and configure most or all of the production and staging environments. Tools should be in place for a minimum of one of the following: integration, release, deployment, configuration and monitoring.

Implement Source Code Version Control

Version control is a common technique used by DevOps practitioners. In high-velocity environments, it’s necessary to capture every detail of the change, including what was changed, when it was changed and who changed it, together with any authorizations that may have been given. Version control tools help an organization in maintaining clear accountability and traceability for all the application software deployed into the live environment. In the event of an incident or user issue, the logs are critical in resolving the incident and preventing a recurrence. Thus, by extending version control to the DevOps toolchain, it is possible for an auditor or any DevOps team member to look at change logs and confirm the precise state of every software component and the module that was deployed into the live environment at any point in time.

Trust but Verify

In a digital business, it is necessary to shift the security and integrity practices from an enterprise-control mind set to a trust-but-verify approach. The main principle of this approach is reducing the value inhibitors. As the scope of auditable version control extends through the infrastructure, the operations team can become more comfortable with product teams essentially managing their own changes and releases. Operations policies should adopt this approach where the impact of change is restricted to the product team making the change, or where there are a small number of dependencies that have been previously accounted for, acknowledged and approved. This approach is generally appreciated by teams that often resent the traditional approach of highly controlling processes. It is a recognized agile and DevOps principle that the higher the product velocity, the higher the team accountability and trust exhibited.

Using these three best practices, you can successfully implement change control for your DevOps toolchain.