GitHub Branching Strategy for Multi Account Environments

TechOps Examples

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Along with a use case deep dive, we identify the remote job opportunities, top news, tools, and articles in the TechOps industry.

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IN TODAY'S EDITION

🧠 Use Case

• GitHub Branching Strategy for Multi Account Environments

🚀 Top News

• The state of Kubernetes jobs Report 2024 Q3

  Platform Engineers Earn 20% More Than DevOps Engineers.

  Docker is featured in over 60% of Kubernetes roles.

  Jenkins dominates CI/CD with 36% of roles.

👀 Remote Jobs

• Horizen Labs is hiring a Senior DevOps Engineer

  Remote Location: Worldwide

• Supabase is hiring a Site Reliability Engineer

  Remote Location: Worldwide

📚️ Resources

• Fargate vs EC2

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• 5 Awesome Docker Tools To Make Your Life Easier

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• Kubernetes Monitoring Events with kubectl and Grafana Loki

  This article breaks down Kubernetes Event types like failed events and evictions, demonstrates using kubectl and plugins for detailed insights, and covers integrating events with Grafana Loki for visualization and alerts.

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🧠 USE CASE

GitHub Branching Strategy for Multi Account Environments

Efficiently managing deployments across sandbox, development, test, staging, and production accounts requires more than just pushing updates.

An ideal approach should reduce deployment risks, support gated approvals, and ensure that only tested and approved code reaches production, maintaining system integrity across accounts.

This specific GitHub branching strategy proves to be incredibly handy.

Architecture Overview:

Here’s the simplified breakdown of the flow depicting the movement of code through various environments and approval stages from development to production.

Release Flow:

1. Develop code on the feature/* branch in the Sandbox account.

2. Deploy to Sandbox from feature/* branch for testing.

3. Create merge request for feature/* branch to merge into the main branch.

4. Merge feature/* to main branch.

5. Build, publish artifacts in Develop environment.

6. deploy from main branch to Develop environment.

7. Deploy with gated approval to Test environment.

8. Deploy with gated approval to Stage environment.

9. Deploy with gated approval to Production environment.

Hotfix Flow:

HF1. Develop code on the hotfix/* branch in the Sandbox account.

HF2. Deploy to Sandbox from hotfix/* branch for testing.

HF3. Create merge request for hotfix/* branch to merge into the main branch.

4. Merge hotfix/* to main branch.

5 - 9. Same as release flow. (Develop → Test → Staging → Prod deployments with gated approvals)

Bugfix Flow:

BF1. Develop code on the bugfix/* branch in the Sandbox account.

BF2. Deploy to Sandbox from bugfix/* branch for testing.

BF3. Create merge request for bugfix/* branch to merge into the main branch.

4. Merge bugfix/* to main branch.

5 - 9. Same as release flow. (Develop → Test → Staging → Prod deployments with gated approvals)

Accounts Overview:

• Sandbox/Develop Accounts: Feature development and testing are isolated in feature branches. Developers can work on feature branches, manually deploy, and test their changes. Once done, the code is merged into the main branch.

• Test/Stage Accounts: Here, more controlled environments come into play. Code from the main branch undergoes further testing, and once features are ready for production, they go through deployments with gated approvals to avoid premature release.

• Production Accounts: The final, stable code on gated approvals gets pushed to production. Continuous integration need to ensure that only stable and verified code reaches production.

Things to Consider:

1. Automation Pipelines: Ensure that pipelines are automated for each environment, from build to deployment, to avoid manual errors. Use CI/CD triggers to manage this based on branch updates (e.g., only deploy to develop when a branch merges to main).

2. Branch Naming Conventions: Enforce a strict naming convention for branches (e.g., feature/*, hotfix/*, bugfix/*) so everyone knows their purpose.

3. Testing Strategies: Implement a robust testing strategy at every stage. Code in feature branches should be unit tested, while integration and end-to-end testing should happen at the bugfix/* or main stages.

Final Thoughts: The success of GitHub branching strategy in multi-account cloud setups depends on defined stages, proper gating, and isolated workstreams, which make the code stable, well-tested, and ready for deployment without causing outages.

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