Change Management Policy
1. Purpose
This policy describes how changes to AetherCloud's production code and infrastructure are proposed, reviewed, and deployed.
2. Version control
All production code lives in version-controlled git repositories. Every change is a discrete, attributable commit with a message describing its purpose. Nothing is deployed from an uncommitted or unreviewed state.
3. Review before merge
Non-trivial changes go through a structured review process before merging to the branch that deploys to production — covering correctness, security implications (authentication, authorization, input handling, secrets), and test coverage. This is a consistent review process we apply to every change, not an ad hoc gut check — it's simply not yet a multi-human review, since AetherCloud is operated by a single founder-engineer today (see our Trust page). As the team grows, this policy will require a second human reviewer on all production-affecting changes.
4. Testing
Changes are expected to include automated test coverage for new behavior, and the existing test suite must pass before merge. Our TypeScript-based codebase additionally runs type checking as a build gate.
5. Deployment
Deployments are traceable to a specific, reviewed commit. Database schema changes go through versioned migrations, not ad hoc manual edits to production data structures. Rollback is possible by redeploying a prior known-good commit.
6. Emergency changes
Security-critical fixes (e.g. an actively exploited vulnerability) may bypass the standard review cadence to ship faster, but are logged and retroactively reviewed within one business day.