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Git-as-Source-of-Truth

Summary

RelyLoop never edits your cluster. The output of a study is a Pull Request against your central search-config Git repo. Your named approvers merge it; your CI deploys it. Git is the audit trail, the review surface, and the deployment trigger — RelyLoop's job ends at the PR.

Why end at a PR

Production search config is a high-blast-radius change. Teams already have a trusted way to manage those: version control, code review, and CI. RelyLoop plugs into that posture instead of inventing a parallel one.

flowchart LR
    S[Study converges] --> P[Proposal:<br/>winning config]
    P --> PR[Pull Request<br/>to config repo]
    PR --> R{Approver review}
    R -->|merge| CI[Operator CI deploys]
    R -->|close| X[No change]

Every change that reaches production has a diff, a reviewer, and a merge commit. Nothing reaches the serving path without a human who holds merge rights saying yes.

The apply path

When you open a proposal, RelyLoop's GitHub provider:

  1. Clones (or updates) the configured config repo.
  2. Writes the winning parameters into the tracked config files.
  3. Opens a Pull Request with the diff and a link back to the study + digest.

The PR body explains what changed and why — the digest narrative travels with it, so the approver sees the metric movement and trade-offs without leaving the review.

Approval lives in the config repo, not in RelyLoop

RelyLoop has no in-tool "approve" button. Approval is delegated to your config repo's branch protection — the same named approvers and rules you already trust. RelyLoop cannot bypass them.

Providers

GitHub is supported today behind a GitProvider adapter. GitLab and Bitbucket are in the backlog; the adapter boundary is already in place so adding them is an adapter, not a rewrite.

The contrast

The closest competing optimizer — OpenSearch's Search Relevance Workbench — has no apply path at all, by explicit RFC decision ("focuses on evaluation and analysis, not production deployment mechanisms"). The Git-PR posture is one of RelyLoop's most durable differentiators.

Back to The Optimization Loop.