Before Infrastructure CI/CD Pipelines
Application changes are tested in pre-production environments, and these changes need to be applied to all servers across all environments that the application uses.
This starts by specifying configuration changes to apply to the first pre-production environment. The changes are applied and tested in the first environment, then specified changes are applied to the next environment, based on which configuration performed. The process continues all the way through to production.
This process is similar to the software delivery process without CI/CD and yields the same problems: low quality configuration in production, slow delivery of changes, and costly implementation.