Posted by: Shaun Kruger 5 years, 3 months ago

(Comments)

If there were ever a pair of iconic symbols for making quick changes while playing fast and loose they would be the gun and cowboy hat.

These wild west symbols are fitting in the context of systems and development. The west was wild because a lot of the rules didn't seem to be in effect or enforcable yet. Some rules even got in the way of getting very important work done. The more established a community is the more rules there will be. The same is true with your servers.

In a small startup it seems like there is a brief waiting period (to make sure nobody is going to run right out and shoot their foot off) and then each person is issued a gun and cowboy hat in the form of the root passwords to everything. This makes sense at that scale because there is a lot of stuff to get done and for a period of time delivering on deadlines is more important than stability.

As a business grows and people become dependent on services things change and it's time to put the cowboy hats away. This is because many quick changes that "shouldn't do anything unexpected" often do, and for the sake of uptime and the preservation of the admin's down time change control processes must be implemented.

In its most basic sense any change control process needs to start with two simple questions: "What is going to go wrong?" and "Is this going to wake anyone up in the middle of the night?" (protip: the answer is yes.)

Usually most people are going to say that a change is non-impacting but that is frequently because it has only been validated in a limited scope and has not gone through any kind of regression testing. A good change control process brings everyone together that interfaces with the thing being changed so that they can ask questions and discover problems that others can't see in their limited scope.

Change control is a lot of work, it requires support from management and admins equally when there are people who just want to put on their cowboy hat and "get things done". Those that push for a safe process can often be accused of being obstructionist. For what it's worth, you can give into these accusations and hand out cowboy hats and guns as people get impatient, but let's first pause to remember how that ended for Major Kong.