Motivation

Many enterprises require robust governance for all change management. This is oftentimes done within blessed systems-of-record, with ServiceNow being the most frequently common. Plural allows for you to synchronize these processes with the GitOps-friendly pull request workflow offered by your SCM provider, using two main strategies:

1. ServiceNow - dedicated controller implementation to synchronize pull request and ServiceNow change request approvals and status
2. Webhook - custom webhook for any nonstandard systems you might want to implement.

In all cases the flow has three main phases:

1. Open - a pull request is opened and a callback is initiated to the external system to create the change record
2. Confirm - the change record is polled on a jittered interval to determine whether the change record has been approved
3. Approval - Plural will approve the Pull Request itself, using a SCM credential you specify
4. Close - The change record is closed once the Pull Request is merged or closed

Managing PR Approval

This flow guarantees pull requests cannot be merged unless dictated by the external system if and only if the SCM credential provided is made a required approver. This can be done in a few different ways:

1. Repo level configuration. Many repos have global methods to require approvals from specific users and groups.
2. CODEOWNERS - this is a standard convention within Git providers, which delegates specific file paths within a repo to require approvals within users or groups.

We recomend CODEOWNERS as it's more flexible.

Tying a Pull Request to PR Governance