Assessments - The Practice of Cloud System Administration - page 431

• The amount of headroom is systematically optimized to reduce waste.
A.5 Change Management (CM)
Change Management covers how services are deliberately changed over time. This in-
cludes the software delivery platform—the steps involved in a software release: develop,
build, test, and push into production. For hardware, this includes firmware upgrades and
minor hardware revisions. These topics are covered in Chapters 9 , 10 , and 11 .
Sample Assessment Questions
• How often are deployments (releases pushed into production)?
• How much human labor does it take?
• When a release is received, does the operations team need to change anything in it
before it is pushed?
• How does operations know if a release is major or minor, a big or small change?
How are these types of releases handled differently?
• How does operations know if a release is successful?
• How often have releases failed?
• How does operations know that new releases are available?
• Are there change-freeze windows?
• If there is a corporate standard practice for this OR, what is it and how does this
service comply with the practice?
Level 1: Initial
• Deployments are done sparingly, as they are very risky.
• The deployment process is ad hoc and laborious.
• Developers notify operations of new releases when a release is ready for deploy-
ment.
• Releases are not deployed until weeks or months after they are available.
• Operations and developers bicker over when to deploy releases.
Level 2: Repeatable
• The deployment is no longer ad hoc.
• Deployment is manual but consistent.
• Releases are deployed as delivered.