Review

Before applying a change set to your infrastructure, it is essential to review all changes to components included and what actions which will run. System Initiative's review screen allows you to review all potential changes to ensure that you always feel confident applying them to the real world.

The Review Screen

The review screen within the web application offers the best way to see all changes within a change set and review them.

Within a change set, the review screen can be opened by clicking the eye icon in the center section of the top navigation bar, or it can be opened by pressing the hotkey R. The review screen can also be closed via the Escape key.

Components Changed

The left Components Changed area shows a list of all changed components, broken down into three types of changes:

• Created Components: New components added are marked with a plus +
• Updated Components: Modified components are marked with a tilde ~
• Deleted/Erased Components: Removed components are shown with a minus -

After the change type icon on the left, each component entry in the list shows the schema name of the component, the individual component's name, and finally an icon for the qualification status of the component.

The currently selected component is highlighted, and you can either click a component in the list to select it or page between components in the list using the arrow keys or tab and shift+tab.

Component Change Details

The central area of the review screen shows the specific details of the changes made to one component. In the screenshot above, three changes have been made to an AWS::EC2::VPC component called "demo-vpc" - two boolean properties (EnableDnsSupport and EnableDnsHostnames) have been changed, and one new piece of data (InstanceTenancy) was set to a new value.

Each change can be reverted back to what is on HEAD by clicking its Revert button.

You can navigate to the component details page for the component by clicking the text on the header of this section.

Actions

The actions section is a collapsible panel at the bottom middle of the screen underneath the component change details section. It allows you to see which actions the component has and which ones are set to run when the change set is merged.

Each action is shown with a toggle to indicate if it will run or not, an icon to show what type of action it is, and the name of the action.

When a component is deleted or erased in a change set, no actions are available for it.

Component History

The component history section at the top of the right panel shows a detailed log of all edits made to the selected component, including edits which no longer result in a change.

The screenshot above shows five edits done to demo-vpc, but since one of these edits reverted the other one, these changes only resulted in the three changes shown in the component change details section.

Diff

The diff section at the bottom of the right panel shows the diff view for the component.

You can easily copy the diff by clicking the copy icon in the top right of the code area.