Environments

The Rig Platform supports a multi-environment architecture out-of-the-box. All Capsules in the Platform are automatically deployable to all environments. That means a single Environment always contains some sub-set of all Platform Capsules.

Each environment has its own configuration of a given Capsule. Capsule A can e.g. have 10 replicas in production but only 2 in staging.

In this example, changes made to Capsules in Environment B are not reflected to Capsules in Environment A, and vice-versa.

Creating new environments

To create a new environment, use the following CLI command:

rig env create my-environment my-cluster

The newly created environment is immediately available for existing Capsules as a deployment target:

rig deploy -E my-environment my-capsule --image nginx

Custom namespace templating

By default, namespaces in the new environment will be named after the project. To change this, a custom namespace template can be provided:

rig env create my-environment my-cluster \
  --namespace-template '{{ .Project.Name }}-{{ .Environment.Name }}'

This example will suffix all namespaces with the environment, allowing multiple environments in a single cluster.

the following template variables are available:

• .Project.Name: The name of the project
• .Environment.Name: The name of the environment

Deleting environments

An environment can be deleted with a simple command;

rig env delete my-environment

However, if any Capsules is currently running in the environment, the operation will abort. Use --force to override this behavior.

Force deletion

Force deletion an environment will stop all running Capsules in that environment. Use this flag with care.

Ephemeral environments

Ephemeral environments are short-lived environments often used in a CI/CD context for testing purposes. Due to the flexible nature of environments, it's very straight forward to implement ephemeral environments with Rig.

The following steps are easily implemented in any CI/CD systems, such as GitHub Actions, GitLab or Circle CI:

1. First, the new environment should be created. This can be based on the pull-request ID, branch-name or something else:

   rig env create "temp-env-$BRANCH_NAME" testing-cluster \
     --namespace-template '{{ .Project.Name }}-{{ .Environment.Name }}'

2. Next, all capsules that should be running in this environment should be deployed:

   rig deploy -E "temp-env-$BRANCH_NAME" -P my-project my-capsule1 --image nginx
   rig deploy -E "temp-env-$BRANCH_NAME" -P my-project my-capsule2 --image nginx

3. Finally, when the environment is no longer used, e.g. when a pull-request is closed, the environment can be deleted:

   rig env delete "temp-env-$BRANCH_NAME" --force

Multi-Cluster setup using Environments

Environments are associated to a single cluster, meaning Rig supports multiple clusters through environments.

Multiple environments can also exist in a single cluster (useful for ephemeral environments), meaning any mix and match of environments and clusters are possible:

Here two production-clusters each have a single environment, while a staging has a number of testing environments.

unique namespaces

When having multiple environments in a single cluster, it's important to ensure the namespace template generated unique namespaces, preferable by having the environments as part of the namespace name.