Foundry Branching is in limited beta and is in active development. To use, contact Palantir Support to enable the Foundry Branching application on your enrollment.
Foundry Branching enables you to develop and test comprehensive end to end workflows in the Palantir platform that might otherwise be too disruptive or risky for a live production environment. While data pipelines and the Ontology support separate branching workflows, Foundry Branching treats data pipelines, logic, the Ontology, and Workshop applications akin to components of a monorepo. This enables user to treat the Palantir platform as a single repository that houses the Ontology, encompasses various distinct data pipelines, and frontend applications to allow for branching full end to end workflows. Foundry Branching provides a unified experience to propose and deploy changes that spans these assets.
Foundry Branching allows data integrators and app builders to implement interconnected and co-dependent changes to data integrations, Ontology definitions, and Workshop applications without risking the integrity of live data. They can utilize completely isolated data to test their alterations.
The primary advantage of Foundry Branching is that it fosters a safe environment for proposing, reviewing, and refining wide-ranging changes to multiple resources. It encourages collaborative development through shared reviews and approvals. Once changes are finalized and approved, they can be deployed into the main branch. This feature ensures a safe and controlled approach to updating and improving upon data pipelines, the Ontology, and Workshop applications.
Branches are intended to be relatively short-lived and retention policies are available to auto-close stagnant branches.
Each branch has associated compute costs. Work is in progress to provide insights into branch costs within Resource Management.
Foundry Branching enables development and testing of workflow changes on an isolated branch, and is ideal for managing changes in a development environment by allowing multiple developers to work in isolation, and only merge their changes into the main branch when the feature is complete. Release management is the process of managing multiple versions of resources across distinct environments that serve different purposes.
Release management and Foundry Branching can work together harmoniously. They should not be seen as alternative solutions to the same problem, but rather complementary solutions to different problems. For example, you can use release management and Foundry Branching together when developing a large feature that needs to be added to a workflow. Larger features could take a few weeks to develop and require foundational changes to dataset and object type schemas. You can develop this feature on a Foundry branch and merge the changes into the development environment when it is completed. Then, you can use release management to deploy these changes to your test and production environments.