Streamlining Workflows with Feature Branches and Logical Stacks

Efficient collaboration and streamlined deployment processes are essential in modern development workflows, especially for teams working on complex projects. Feature branches and stack-based development approaches offer powerful ways to isolate changes, test effectively, and ensure seamless integration. However, proper strategies can make managing resources, dependencies, and environments challenging. This blog explores how to optimize feature branch workflows, maintain encapsulated logical stacks, and apply best practices like resource naming to improve clarity, scalability, and cost-effectiveness.

Working with feature branches

I have a strong preference for encapsulating things into logical stacks. These stacks should have a minimal number of dependencies. And you should be able to deploy multiple instances. Let me first explain why you want to deploy multiple instances of the same stack. The answer is quite simple! Feature branches! If you work in a team with multiple people, you might work on different stories. Therefore, you don’t want to update the same environment with your changes. My change might break your change and vice versa. Detecting why something failed becomes more challenging in this case. By deploying your own environment, your changes will only impact your environment. When you are done, you can thoroughly test your changes before merging them into the main branch.

Working with multiple stacks

You can use multiple stacks, each with its area of responsibility, to keep things small and simple. However, this also introduces the danger of breaking encapsulation and introducing dependencies, such as an Amazon Relational Database Service - managed SQL database. You need to create it in a base stack and pass it to other stacks. This is needed because the components in the other stacks will need the endpoint to connect to it, creating a dependency.

This example applies to the more traditional lift and shift approaches. However, we always advise modernizing to reap all the benefits of the cloud. Why? Simple: In the example, we needed an RDS instance. If you create an RDS instance per stack, you will have multiple instances and must pay per RDS instance, driving up the cost. By switching to serverless, you pay for the usage. This will allow you to move the database into your stacks, removing the dependency. I explicitly say option because, in relational databases, it’s not always possible to split the database into two because of the nature of relational databases.

Use proper naming for your resources.

Amazon CloudFormation can handle naming resources for you. A naming schema follows this pattern: StackName + LogicalResourceId + RandomizedString. This ensures that you don’t end up with duplicate resource names. Some resources allow you to have duplicates, while others do not. So, having a guaranteed unique name is perfect from the perspective of having feature branches. But from a management perspective, this is bad. Most names are trimmed after several characters, and the generated long names are not that descriptive.

By introducing a prefix, you can have a clear name and still deploy your stacks multiple times. You simply pass the prefix as a parameter and prefix each resource name. So, for an AWS Identity and Access Management role, that could be Joris-CheckoutProcess. The CheckoutProcess name describes what it is, a role used by, for example, a AWS Lambda function that processes the checkout. The prefix Joris makes it unique and provides information about who owns and created the resource. Using this pattern you avoid creating a scavenger hunt.

Conclusion

Adopting feature branches and logical stacks is an excellent way to foster efficient, error-free collaboration in team environments. You can enhance your development workflow by deploying isolated environments for individual changes, embracing serverless solutions to reduce dependencies, and implementing descriptive naming conventions. These practices streamline debugging and testing and ensure resource management remains clear and cost-efficient. Whether you’re modernizing applications or maintaining legacy systems, these strategies will help you maximize benefits of cloud-based development.

Photo by Min An