Deploy Ad Hoc branches to lower risk stages

[michaelasper]

I know it's not perfect Gitops, but we have pretty strict main branch requirements so it would be a huge slowdown if Engineers wanted PR things for a dev environment

Here's what I imagine

Warehouse(git: ^feature-branch/*) -> dev

Warehouse(git: main) -> dev -> stage -> prod

Issue seems to be here: #2907

But I am curious how people are doing it with the current implementation. Thanks

[michaelasper]

One way I'm thinking about it, is for feature branches to create a tag when they're ready to deploy?

warehouse(allowtags: ^dev-blah-blah) -> dev

warehouse(git branch: main) -> dev -> stage -> main

[michaelasper]

[michaelasper]

Ending trying something like this with moderate success, the issue being argocd-update, i can't have two stages being authorized

[michaelasper]

Switching it to this way makes it tough to write a promotion template because git-clone does not work, and i don't understand how explicitly putting a warehouse down makes sense

[michaelasper]

Ending up going back to separate pipelines, will leave the argocd update steps on the main trackline

[krancour]

Remember Kargo is about promotions and not deployments -- the difference being that deployments (Argo CD's job) reconcile cluster state against desired state in git, while promotions are about changing "the state of the desired state."

So I'm wondering if a shift of perspective perhaps makes your problem more solvable...

Instead of thinking in terms of "how do I get the contents of some arbitrary branch into dev?" what if you look at it in terms of, "how do I get the things I want in dev into the branch that dev already syncs to?"