Change management
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The objective of change management is to ensure that every change to the IaaS is managed in a controlled way, whilst maintaining the quality of the network and service, and minimizing the effect of any disturbance. In the change management process, DT Cloud Services has included elements of both DevOps and CI/CD practices for change implementation and is following ITIL ChM practices for announcing, reviewing and approving each change.
DT Cloud Services relies on a full infrastructure as code (IaC) concept, where all the current states of any given cloud instance is fully represented as software artifacts in a centralized repository. CI/CD tools are used to manage the deployment of changes through CI/CD pipelines.
A Request for Change (RFC) is a request to change an existing service or the introduction of a new service that results in an addition, modification, or removal of supported services or components, and needs a formal approval.
Changes should be cost effective and enhance business processes with minimum risk to the user services. Changes can be triggered either proactively or reactively:
Proactively - aiming at business benefits from improved services or efficiency in its management and support
Reactively - resolving errors and adapting to changing circumstances
Normal change
A normal change refers to non-trivial changes to services, processes, and infrastructure that must follow the complete change management process. Normal changes are often categorized after risk and the impact to the organization or business. Consequently, a minor change implies low risk and impact, and major change implies a high risk and impact.
Emergency change
Emergency changes are changes that must be implemented quickly to resolve an incident. The emergency change class is reserved for changes needed to repair an error in a service that is affecting the business to a high degree. Emergency changes could be applied without approval from users, but DevOps must notify the correspondent user about the change before its deployment in a live environment (through the trouble ticket tool and by phone).
Standard change
Standard changes are pre-approved changes that are considered to carry relatively low risk and that are performed frequently following a documented process. A list of standard changes must be agreed on between the parties and approved by the user.
The Change Management Process defines two possible use cases triggering service standard RFCs:
Reactive - user notification to DT Cloud Services
Proactive - DT Cloud Services notification to user