Change Management vs CD
Reconciling CAB-era controls with continuous delivery without pretending either away.
5 to work through
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advanced
A regulated organisation's change management process requires approval for every production change, and the team wants continuous delivery. Are they compatible?
2 min answer -
advanced
An enterprise change advisory process conflicts with continuous delivery. How can both requirements be met?
2 min answer -
advanced
Most incidents in an organisation are caused by configuration changes rather than code deploys. How should configuration be versioned, canaried, validated and rolled back with the same rigour as code?
3 min answer -
advanced
The business mandates a code freeze for all of December, the highest revenue month. Engineering objects. Who is right?
2 min answer -
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Your CAB meets weekly and every production change needs approval. Lead time is 9 days, of which 6 are waiting. The board will not simply be removed. What is your approach?
2 min answer
3 terms in this topic
Configuration as Change
Applying the review, validation, staging and rollback discipline of code deployment to configuration, content and data updates - because they change …
practiceDeployment Freeze
A period during which deployments are prohibited, intended to protect a high-stakes business window.
practiceStandard Change
A pre-authorised, low-risk, repeatable change type that may be executed without going through a change advisory board.
Neighbouring topics
Delivery & Release Engineering
General material on getting a change from commit to production safely and often.
Pipeline Architecture
Stages, fan-out, caching, and the difference between a pipeline and a long script.
Build Reproducibility
Pinned inputs and hermetic builds, so one commit cannot produce two different artifacts.
Artifact Management
Immutable versioned outputs, promotion between repositories, and retention policy.
Environment Strategy
How many environments earn their cost, what each proves, and what none of them prove.
Branching Models
GitFlow, trunk and release branches as delivery constraints rather than Git preferences.
Continuous Integration Discipline
Integrating to the mainline daily, and the test speed and review culture that requires.
Deployment Strategies
Rolling, blue-green, canary and shadow, and the traffic and state each one assumes.
Progressive Delivery
Separating deploy from release, and exposing a change to users in controlled increments.
Rollback & Forward Fix
When reversing is genuinely possible, and designing so that it usually is.
Database Migration Under CD
Expand-contract, backwards-compatible schema change, and migrations that cannot roll back.
GitOps
Declared desired state in version control, with a reconciler closing the gap continuously.
IaC Modules & Drift
Reusable infrastructure modules, state ownership, and detecting what changed out of band.
Policy as Code
Encoding standards as automated admission and plan-time checks instead of review comments.
Pipeline Secrets
Short-lived credentials, workload identity, and why the CI system is a prime target.
Supply-Chain Provenance
SBOMs, signed artifacts, attestation, and knowing what actually went into a build.
Deployment Gates
Automated verification between stages, and the difference between a gate and a delay.
Flow Metrics
Work in progress, flow time and flow efficiency — where a change waits rather than moves.
Multi-Region Rollout
Ordering regions, bake time, and stopping a bad change before it becomes global.