While trunk-based development is indeed considered an industry best practice for many engineering teams—especially those prioritizing continuous integration and rapid deployment—GitFlow still has value in certain contexts. Databricks often works with enterprise customers in regulated industries (finance, healthcare, public sector) where:
Long-lived release branchesprovide a clear audit trail for compliance.
Hotfix branchesallow for controlled production patches without impacting ongoing feature development.
Multiple concurrent releasesneed to be managed for different environments or clients.
In these situations, GitFlow’s structured branching model can make release governance and risk mitigation easier, even if it trades off some of the speed and simplicity of trunk-based development. That said, Databricks doesn’t enforce GitFlow—it’s one of several patterns we support. For teams able to adopt trunk-based workflows, we actively encourage it, but we also recognize that some customer environments require the guardrails GitFlow provides.
