Teams who embrace the pipeline as the way to manage changes to their infrastructure find a number of benefits: Their infrastructure management tooling and codebase is always production ready. There is never a situation where extra work is needed (e.g., merging, regression testing, and βhardeningβ) to take work live. Delivering changes is nearly painless. Once a change has passed the technical validation stages of the pipeline, it shouldnβt need technical attention to carry through to production unless there is a problem. There is no need to make technical decisions about how to apply a change to production, as those decisions have been made, implemented, and tested in earlier stages. Itβs easier to make changes through the pipeline than any other way. Hacking a change manually other than to bring up a system that is down is more work, and scarier, than just pushing it through the pipeline. Compliance and governance are easy. The scripts, tools, and configuration for making changes are transparent to reviewers. Logs can be audited to prove what changes were made, when, and by whom. With an automated change management pipeline, a team can prove what process was followed for each and every change. This tends to be stronger than taking someoneβs word that documented manual processes are always followed. Change management processes can be more lightweight. People who might otherwise need to discuss and inspect each change can build their requirements into the automated tooling and tests. They can periodically review the pipeline implementation and logs, and make improvements as needed. Their time and attention goes to the process and tooling, rather than inspecting each change one by one. Morris, Kief. Infrastructure as Code: Managing Servers in the Cloud (Kindle Locations 4551-4563). O'Reilly Media. Kindle Edition.