Change management and rollback strategies using IaC in CI/CD Pipelines

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) has emerged as a cornerstone of modern cloud and DevOps practices, enabling the management and provisioning of infrastructure through code-based configurations. The integration of IaC with Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines provides organizations with a comprehensive framework for automating the provisioning, configuration, and management of cloud resources. Despite these advantages, the automation of infrastructure introduces complexities, particularly in the realm of change management and efficient rollback mechanisms. This paper explores in-depth strategies for managing changes and implementing reliable rollback techniques using IaC within CI/CD pipelines. We discuss manual rollbacks, automated rollbacks, blue-green deployments, and canary deployments, detailing the trade-offs, benefits, and best practices for each approach. The paper also presents real-world case studies to demonstrate the practical implementation of these strategies, alongside graphs depicting the increasing adoption of IaC from 2013 to 2018 and the frequency of various rollback strategies based on a 2018 survey. Our findings emphasize the critical role of automated and strategic rollback mechanisms in maintaining system stability, minimizing downtime, and ensuring continuous performance of cloud-native applications. This research provides actionable insights and recommendations for practitioners seeking to optimize their IaC and CI/CD processes, ultimately contributing to more secure, resilient, and high-performing cloud operations.