📈High Scalability·August 16, 2023

Rethinking Change Management for High-Velocity Systems

This article critically examines traditional change management processes, arguing that they often fail to mitigate risk in modern, high-velocity IT environments. It uses the Swedbank outage as a case study to highlight how compliance-driven change controls can be ineffective and even detrimental to system stability. The piece advocates for a shift towards technical risk reduction through smaller, more frequent changes, automation, and enhanced observability, aligning with DevOps principles.

DevOps & SRE Performance & Scaling Distributed Systems

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The Flaws of Traditional Change Management

The Swedbank outage, caused by an unapproved change, serves as a stark example of how traditional change management processes can fail. Despite regulations and significant fines, relying on manual approvals and Change Advisory Boards (CABs) does not inherently reduce operational risk. Research indicates that CABs frequently approve over 90% of changes without significantly improving system stability, and in some cases, external approvals can even negatively correlate with deployment frequency and lead time to restore service, without improving change fail rates.

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The Illusion of Control

Traditional change management often creates an illusion of control by focusing on process adherence and documentation, rather than actual risk mitigation. This can lead to a false sense of security where documented but risky changes pass through unnoticed, while undocumented changes pose unaddressed threats.

Modern Approaches to Risk Mitigation

Instead of focusing on bureaucratic change controls, effective risk management in system design and operations shifts towards making changes inherently less risky. Key strategies include:

Smaller, More Frequent Releases: Reduces the blast radius of any single change and makes issues easier to identify and revert.
Automated Change Controls: Integrates checks and validations directly into the CI/CD pipeline, ensuring consistency and reducing human error.
Enhanced Observability and Monitoring: Provides real-time insights into system behavior, allowing for detection of unauthorized changes and faster incident response.
Fast Rollback Capabilities: Enables quick reversion to a stable state if a new deployment introduces problems.

These practices are central to a DevOps culture, where the speed of software delivery is harmonized with robust cybersecurity, audit, and compliance demands. The goal is to embed quality and safety into the delivery pipeline rather than gatekeeping at the end.

Observability as a Core Control

The article draws parallels between the Swedbank incident and the Knight Capital incident, both highlighting how insufficient observability and traceability of changes in production systems prolonged outages. Runtime monitoring is crucial not just for detecting incidents, but also for identifying unauthorized or problematic changes that bypassed traditional controls. Without it, the full scope of changes and their potential risks remains unknown.

change managementincident responseobservabilitydevopsrisk managementcontinuous deliveryfinancial servicessystem stability

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Architecture Design

Design this yourself

Design a highly available and resilient financial transaction processing system, detailing how you would implement modern change management practices and robust observability to minimize the risk of outages due to configuration or code changes, drawing lessons from incidents like Swedbank and Knight Capital. Focus on automated deployments, canary releases, and comprehensive runtime monitoring.

Other design angles

· Design a CI/CD pipeline for a critical microservices-based financial application, emphasizing automated testing, secure deployment practices, and integrated observability to reduce change-related risks.· Develop an observability strategy for a large-scale distributed banking system that can detect unauthorized changes and provide rapid incident response capabilities, including tracing, logging, and metrics.· Propose a strategy to transition a legacy financial system with traditional change controls to a modern DevOps model, addressing technical challenges, risk mitigation, and compliance requirements.