Your CI GitFlow is Broken

GitFlow, a popular branching model used in software development, can face challenges when relying on a single testing environment for staging and production branches, leading to slow release cycles, scalability issues, and financial inefficiencies due to continuous resource usage. The traditional method involves merging feature branches into a staging branch associated with a testing environment, which becomes a bottleneck when multiple developers need to test their work. To address these issues, the adoption of Preview Environments, or Ephemeral Environments, is proposed, where a dedicated production-like environment is created for each Pull Request. This approach allows parallel testing and deployment of features, reducing waiting times and resource wastage, though it may introduce complexity and higher maintenance costs. Despite these challenges, platforms like Qovery offer solutions to implement these environments swiftly and with minimal maintenance, enhancing the efficiency of the GitFlow methodology.