From Change to Export: The Full Lifecycle

Everything in this series exists to answer one question a service owner should always be able to answer instantly: what is my service's config, right now, and can I trust it?

A branch review is the deliberate, separate step — one Owner/Admin decision, informed by a readiness score and an impact preview, that applies every change the branch carries and fires the fan-out notification for each of them. From there, approval is what actually goes live: the moment your service's impact is approved, export reflects it, no further step required. Publish still exists, but it's narrower — promoting your own local override into effect, a service opting itself out. And every step of that chain — the merge, each approval and rejection, every override publish — lands in the audit History, searchable after the fact, revertible when a merge turns out to be wrong.

That's the whole ecosystem: four domains — env values, DB structure, API routes, and validation rules — one shared Branch/Merge governance engine, a visibility layer that scores, records, and reports everything moving through it, and a single trustworthy answer at the end: your service's config, exactly as reviewed, exactly as approved.