Use Reliably Environments

This guide goes into the details of creating and using Reliably environments to inject contexts into your Reliably Plans.

Reliably Experiments describe a set of activities to conduct. These activities are usually context-dependent. For instance, a given experiment may be designed to work against Kubernetes. You would expect that such an experiment can target any Kubernetes cluster that you run, therefore credentials should not be embedded into the experiment.

This is where Reliably Environments come into play. They allow you to declare a set of environment variables and secrets that you can attach to a Reliably Plan for a particular run of an Experiment. Thus providing the context it needs.

The Basics

Create an Environment

To create an environment, go to the New environment page and start filling out the form as needed.

Provide a name that you can easily recall what it covers later on. Then set as many environment variables and secrets, which are encrypted internally, as you need.

Delete an Environment

You can delete environments at will but only when all Reliably Plan that use them have also been deleted first. This prevents mistakes where a Plan tries to run and cannot find its Environment.

Common Patterns

This section will introduce common Environment patterns that will help you pass the right context to a variety of experiments.

These patterns apply to any Reliably Deployment type. But you declare these variables and secrets in Reliably only when using a Reliably Cloud deployment. Otherwise, these variables and secrets are declared directly on the platform you use to execute Reliably Plans.

Kubernetes

Experiments targetting Kubernetes clusters usually require a service account that will define the Kubernetes API server endpoint and credentials to authenticate to it. The service account should then have the right roles to perform the experiment’s activities, using the least privileges approach.

AWS

Experiments targeting AWS resources usually require enough information to authenticate.

Alternatively, you can only use a secret file as well:

Google Cloud Platform

Experiments targetting GCP services usually require a service account, which should have the right roles to perform the experiment’s activities.

Azure

Experiments targeting Azure services requires a set of values to authenticate with the right Azure endpoint and services.

GitHub

Experiments targetting GitHub services require a token with the appropriate permissions for the experiments in the Reliably Plan.