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DevOps Intermediate

What is Trunk-Based Development?

A source control strategy where developers integrate small changes directly into the main branch frequently, often multiple times per day.

Trunk-based development minimizes merge conflicts and enables continuous integration by having all developers commit to a single shared branch (trunk/main). Short-lived feature branches (lasting hours, not days) are permitted but must merge quickly. This approach requires strong automated testing, feature flags for incomplete work, and code review practices. It enables continuous deployment since the trunk is always in a deployable state. Google, Facebook, and other tech giants practice trunk-based development at massive scale. It contrasts with GitFlow where long-lived branches can diverge significantly.

Related Terms

Service Discovery
A mechanism that automatically detects and tracks the network locations of service instances in distributed systems.
Artifact
A packaged, versioned output of a build process — such as a Docker image, JAR file, or compiled binary — ready for deployment.
Terraform
An open-source tool for provisioning and managing cloud infrastructure using declarative configuration files.
GitFlow
A branching model for Git that defines a strict workflow with feature, develop, release, hotfix, and main branches.
GitOps
A practice where Git repositories serve as the single source of truth for both application code and infrastructure configuration.
Error Budget
The acceptable amount of unreliability allowed for a service, calculated as 100% minus the Service Level Objective.
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