Change Records

One record per significant change to something that is running: the tenant, a workload, the database. What was changed and why, the end state it aimed for, the procedure, how to undo it, and what actually happened.

These are different from the rest of the site. The guides and reference pages are maintained: kept current, edited whenever reality moves. A change record is retained: evidence of what was done on a given day, written once and then left alone apart from its follow-ups closing. Incidents are kept the same way.

When a change needs one

Write a record when the change touches something that is already running and would be hard to reconstruct from the commit alone:

• a terraform apply against the tenant that adds, replaces or removes something issued
• a deployment to the workload, or a new service on it
• a migration of the database, or a source added or removed
• a credential rotated, an account replaced, an authorization renewed

A change confined to the repository — code, tests, documentation — does not need one; the commit is its record. A design choice is not a change: that is an ADR.

New records start from the change record template. Records are numbered CHG-NNNN in the order they are opened, across years, and a number is never reused, even for a change that was abandoned.

A bare CHG-0001 means an eds-inventory record. Anyone else’s is written with its owner: EdS CHG-0040, Deevnet CHG-0021.

Records