Trunk-Based Development
A branching model where developers commit to a single main branch frequently with small changes. Feature flags replace long-lived feature branches.
What is Trunk-Based Development?
A branching model where developers commit to a single main branch frequently with small changes. Feature flags replace long-lived feature branches.
Trunk-Based Development is a intermediate-level concept that sits in the DevOps & CI/CD area of system design. Engineers reach for it whenever they need to reason about real-world trade-offs in that space — not just for textbook correctness, but because real production systems at companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Google make these decisions every day.
If you want to go deeper than this definition — with diagrams, code, and a quiz to lock it in — work through the "Trunk-Based Development" lesson linked below. It walks through the why, the mechanism, the trade-offs, and how the giants actually use it in production.
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Full interactive lesson with diagrams, code examples, real-world references, and a quiz.
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Related glossary terms you might want to look up next.
CI/CD
Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment: automating the process of testing and deploying code. Push code, tests run, and it ships to production automatically.
Feature Flag
A toggle in code that enables or disables a feature without redeploying. Lets you ship code to production behind a flag and turn it on for a percentage of users.
GitOps
Using Git as the single source of truth for infrastructure and application configuration. Changes are made via pull requests and automatically reconciled by tools like ArgoCD or Flux.