Deployment Drill Down

Reliably Deployments are at the heart of your experience with Reliably. They are responsible for executing Reliably Plans.

Reliably provides a variety of approaches to fit your requirements.

Strategies

Running Reliably experiments should have the following properties:

  • Simple
  • Customizable
  • Secure

These facets create the confidence needed by engineering teams to onboard tools such as Reliably. Let’s see what this means for each deployment approach provided by Reliably natively.

Reliably Cloud

Reliably Cloud optimizes for simplicty of usage to allow for rapid implementation of your resilience effort. The goal is that your team grows quickly a good coverage of your system without having to spend too much time lost in the tooling or the way to make it do anything valuable.

Then, Reliably Cloud focuses on being as secure as possible to protect your data and experiments. Environments are encrypted all the way and at rest. Identities that can access your data have a very lock down permission set that prevent data leaking.

Customization is also possible but will be, for now, limited to the capability of the Reliably Cloud agent running in Reliably. For instance, you would not be able to bring your own binary in a Reliably Cloud deployment runtime.

GitHub

GitHub deployment is interesting when you want to have more customization power while also keeping your environment’s data secured outside of Reliably.

Regarding security, the idea is that you can store your data (secrets and environment variables) into GitHub Environment directly. They never have to be seen or stored in Reliably. You can then apply the best practices that GitHub suggests for access to these environments.

Reliably offers a strategy for greater customization of your GitHub deployment as well by letting you declare the GitHub Workflow to be applied when a Reliably Plan is scheduled.

Reliably CLI

The Cloud and GitHub deployments focuses mainly on making the experience of running Reliably Plan as straightforward as possible. Yet, sometimes you might need full control of the runtime environment and they might not be appropriate.

In that case, you can fallback on the Reliably CLI which can run anywhere from your system, as long as Python is available.

Customizing Execution Context

GitHub

The GitHub Deployment approach is to commit and push a GitHub Workflow into the repository that you provide. The worflow is configured as follows:

  • Scheduled to run either directly on its own push event or on a periodic schedule using a CRON pattern, as supported by GitHub
  • Uses the Reliably GitHub Plan action to install the required dependencies
  • Sets the GitHub Environment name to get access to environment variables and secrets in that repository
  • Sets a variety of Reliably environment variable used for metadata purpose
  • Upon completion, the Workflow also commits and pushes the result files from the execution into the repository itself under the directory plans/<plan-id>

You may configure almost the entire context by providing your own GitHub base workflow that Reliably will load before it amends, commits and pushes it to the repository. For instance, a basic GitHub Workflow could look like:

name: Execute a Reliably Plan

on:

jobs:
  execute-reliably-plan:
    runs-on: ubuntu-22.04
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v3
    - uses: reliablyhq/actions/plan@main

When providing your own GitHub Workflow, make sure to name it reliably-plan.yaml so Reliably finds it in your repository.

You can change anything in such a workflow except for the step using reliablyhq/actions/plan as that step will be extended by Reliably to add additional metadata as environment variables. None of which are sensitive.

This therefore allows you to taylor a plan runtime context entirely to your own unique requirements while retaining the convenience of the single-click GitHub deployment.

Your workflow is treated as a template by Reliably. It is read and amended by the changes are committed and pushed as an entire new workflow file into the repository, unique to a single Reliably Plan run.

The workflow expects a GitHub token with the following permissions:

  • Read: Environments
  • Read & Write: Actions, Commit Statuses, Contents, Workflows

Reliably CLI

The Reliably CLI is your friend whenever your requirement prevent you from using the Reliably Cloud or GitHub deployment strategies.

Essentially, this comes down to running a command such as:

reliably service plan execute <plan-id>

The command will collect, from Reliably, the plan and its associated pieces such as the experiments to run and integrations to enable.

If your experiment requires specific environment variables, just mae sure they are accessible to the process when it starts.

This makes this solution great to run from CI other than GitHub for instance.