Branch deployments

One interesting topic to include when talking about IssueOps is branch deployments. At a high-level, branch deployments let you run and control deployments from your PRs.

If you don't already know what they are, the easiest way to explain them is to compare them to the traditional merge deploy model. In the merge deploy model:

1. A developer creates a feature branch and commits changes.
2. The developer opens a PR to get feedback from others.
3. Once approved, the PR is merged and a deployment starts from the main branch.

This works fine, but if there are bugs in the PR, you have to either merge in fixes or revert the commits and redeploy. In the branch deploy model, changes are deployed from the feature branch and validated before being merged into the main branch. This ensures that whatever is in main can be deployed at any time. If there is a problem with the deployment from the feature branch, you can simply redeploy main as-is.

For a detailed description of the branch-deploy model, see github/branch-deploy.