The standard Adobe Commerce Cloud deployment workflow follows a Git-based model where code is promoted through a hierarchy of environments. After changes are tested and verified in the staging environment, the next step is to deploy them to the master branch, which corresponds to the production environment. In the Magento Cloud Web UI, this promotion is accomplished by initiating a merge action from the child environment (staging) to its parent environment (master/production). This action merges the staging branch's code into the master branch, triggering the production deployment process.

A. The branch functionality creates a new child environment from a parent; it is not used for deploying code up the hierarchy to production.

B. The snapshots functionality is for creating backups of an environment's file system and database, not for deploying code.

C. The sync functionality pulls code and/or data down from a parent environment to a child environment, the opposite of deploying to production.

1. Adobe Commerce on Cloud Infrastructure Guide > Deploy your store > Deploy to Production: "After you test your code in the Staging environment

you can merge the staging branch to the master branch to deploy to the Production environment." This section explicitly outlines the merge from staging to master as the final deployment step.

2. Adobe Commerce on Cloud Infrastructure Guide > Get started with Cloud Console > Site management with the Web UI: In the "Environment-level actions" table

the Merge action is described as: "Merges the code from this environment to the parent environment. For example

you can merge code from a staging environment to the master (Production) environment." This confirms the UI action.

3. Adobe Commerce on Cloud Infrastructure Guide > Cloud infrastructure > Starter architecture: The environment architecture diagram and description show that Staging is the direct parent of master (Production) in the promotion workflow

and code flows from Staging to Production. The merge operation facilitates this code promotion.