Because the change process always starts and ends with the developer (yes, you‘re now a developer), you should implement guidelines before the code even reaches the repository. There are a few tools out there you should look at.

The first one is pre-commit hooks. It checks the code against simple issues like missing semicolons, trailing whitespaces and more. The next thing you should have an eye on is the topic of linting with Megalinter. It analyzes the consistency of your code, IAC, configuration and scripts in your repository sources to ensure all of your project sources are clean and correctly formatted.

Implement tfsec to enhance the security of your Terraform code during the development of modules.

After these baselines, you need to check your desired change management flow. This one depends on your specific use case and what you want to deploy. Think about this!

Moreover, take a look at Git flow or GitHub flow. Besides that, good versioning of your scripts and modules is crucial to track changes with your commits. You can use GitHub actions to automatically create updated versions when you create a pull request. Check out this semantic versioning document to know how version numbers should look like.

A good versioning system will greatly enhance production deployments, especially in IaC-related automation projects – by enabling more advanced control of modules and stacks.

Lastly, I have to mention the commit messages you or your colleagues enter when pushing a change to the repository or creating a pull request. This forces you to actually look into the code to check and approve changes. With that said, we should make our lives as simple as possible and reduce overhead.

There‘s nothing more annoying than reading something like “Fix” or Fix for fix” in the comments for a commit.