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Environment Overlays

Environment overlays live under ops/env/ and describe how Atlas runtime behavior changes across base, dev, CI, prod, and overlay layers.

flowchart TD
    Base[Base overlay] --> Select[Overlay selection]
    Select --> Dev[dev]
    Select --> CI[ci]
    Select --> Prod[prod]
    Dev --> Effective[Effective environment]
    CI --> Effective
    Prod --> Effective
    Effective --> Validate[Validation and review]

The overlay model should answer one question quickly: which parts of runtime behavior come from the base environment and which parts are allowed to diverge per environment. Good overlay docs stop operators from creating silent environment folklore around permissions, cluster profile, or network mode.

Source of Truth

  • ops/env/base/
  • ops/env/dev/
  • ops/env/ci/
  • ops/env/prod/
  • ops/env/overlays/

Overlay Semantics

  • base defines the shared defaults such as namespace, cluster profile, and restricted execution assumptions
  • dev relaxes write and subprocess permissions for local work
  • ci and prod preserve the more restricted execution model
  • overlays should change only what the environment legitimately owns, not the underlying release or topology contract