AZ-400 Practice Question: Design and implement a source control strategy
You are designing a branching strategy for a microservices application with independent deployment cadences. The team wants to support continuous deployment to production from the main branch while allowing feature work to be isolated and tested. Which branching strategy best meets these requirements?
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to confuse GitHub Flow with trunk-based development, but GitHub Flow lacks the strict short-lived branch discipline and feature toggle support required for true continuous deployment from main in a microservices context.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Trunk-based development with short-lived feature branches
Trunk-based development with short-lived feature branches (C) is correct because it enables continuous deployment from the main branch while isolating feature work in branches that are merged back to main within hours or a day. This approach minimizes merge conflicts and supports independent deployment cadences for microservices, as each service can be deployed from main independently without waiting for release branches.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
One branch per environment (dev, test, prod)
Why it's wrong here
This pattern conflates code promotion with environment configuration, so feature development is not isolated; all changes merge sequentially into a single environment branch, causing integration conflicts and making it impossible to selectively promote a feature without dragging along unrelated changes, which disrupts continuous delivery.
- ✗
GitHub Flow with feature branches merging to main
Why it's wrong here
GitHub Flow allows feature branches of any duration, but without a strict requirement to merge to main frequently and delete branches immediately, it can lead to long-lived branches, integration conflicts, and delayed feedback, which undermines continuous integration and delivery for microservices.
- ✓
Trunk-based development with short-lived feature branches
Why this is correct
Trunk-based development with short-lived feature branches (typically less than a day) ensures that all developers integrate into main frequently, which minimizes merge conflicts, enables continuous integration, and supports rapid, automated deployment of microservices while still isolating work in progress via feature branches that are merged and deleted quickly.
- ✗
Git Flow with develop, release, and hotfix branches
Why it's wrong here
Git Flow's multiple long-lived branches (develop, release, hotfix) introduce process overhead and staging delays, making it unsuitable for microservices that require frequent, often independent, deployments; the release branch cycle slows down the delivery pipeline and creates additional merge complexity.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Source Control Strategy Design
Key term
Trunk-based development
Trunk-based development is a version control practice where developers integrate small changes frequently into a single main branch, called the trunk, to avoid merge conflicts and enable continuous delivery.
Key term
Branch
A branch is a pointer to a specific commit in a version control system that allows you to work on features or fixes in isolation from the main codebase.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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