Clone and Forget

At this level, templates exist for all Reference Architecture artifacts, such as repository templates, pipeline templates, and templated manifests. Developers clone and run these templates with specific parameters during onboarding to obtain ready-to-use artifacts. From then on, the development team owns these artifacts, leading to a bifurcation between the evolution of the Reference Architecture templates and the specific instance. As divergence increases, it becomes harder to integrate updates from the Reference Architecture templates, often requiring manual merges. Early adopters experience the most significant drifts.