What does this document do:
Outline current standard operating procedures for releasing Cloud products and services for future releases in Marine Aviation Agile Centre of Excellence (MAACE)
Why: Cloud deployment will use a different process compared to non-cloud production releases
Who does this impact:
MAACE product teams and delivery teams
TC Cloud Team
TC Change Management / Client Support
Situational Context
This working document establishes a baseline understanding of TC’s internal process for Cloud releases as we shift away from legacy to new Service Management tool .
Future releases:
BMC Remedy Service Management Suite – a customizable Service Management tool – will replace SMGS (Service Management. – Gestion Service) - production release anticipated April 2022
Change Management (Client Support) will work with MAACE Component Team
MAACE project/product teams to come up with new approval procedures and pipelines.
Would like to figure out how to support continuous deployment with appropriate gating and approvals in place for delivery pipelines.
Current procedure:
Conduct and complete appropriate acceptance testing before requesting changes to PROD for production releases
Complete security assessment and authorization (SA&A) paperwork, if needed
Obtain appropriate Architecture Review Board (ARB) and Technical Architecture Committee (TAC) approvals.
Capture changes to any existing applications as a request in SMGS (Service Management – Gestion Service) stipulating scheduled release date.
Changes should be scheduled at least one week in advance (cut-off is generally Thursday @ noon) on SMGS to give sufficient time to prepare for weekly Change Approval Board (CAB) meetings (Tuesdays). Change management may have some leeway when it comes to scheduling Acceptance server changes: please contact Client Support (ie. Andy Labelle) to discuss, if necessary.
Once CAB approves change and all other necessary approvals received (happens via SMGS - no action needed by the team), production release can proceed as scheduled.
Exceptions
Quicker approvals and more streamlined processes may be possible for non-web group or database group changes - or Acceptance server changes (as discussed above).
Depending on capacity of the web and change management teams, these approval requests could be made on Friday or Monday (instead of Thursday) for Cloud releases ahead of Tuesday’s CAB meeting
More advance notice required for approvals if the application has an outage risk, has a complex release procedure, is public-facing, or is difficult to rollback/restore in case of release issues.