jschoubben
5b3d0ebd4f
The blocking question was where a container image comes from, and the version that blocked assumed the machine might have no network. That assumption came from the LAB: a scenario is a closed address space by design, which is what lets two scenarios hold the same addresses without meeting. Production is not sealed — a machine being adopted has a network, and one that does not is a machine where very little works anyway. So substrate.lock carries references, not payload: an image name and a digest, fetched at apply time. A first node pulls from upstream because no mesh registry exists yet; every node after that pulls from the mesh's own. The lab is the exception and places images itself, the way it already places the host binary — a property of a test environment, and letting it dictate the production design would be the tail wagging the dog. Pinned by DIGEST rather than tag. Reproducibility comes from pinning the identity of a thing, not from carrying its bytes, which is what makes fetching acceptable rather than a compromise. ADR 0041 survives untouched, which was the point. "Copy it onto a machine and run it" stays literally true — one binary, a few megabytes, which then fetches what it was told to. Carrying images would have quietly redefined the property that decision rests on. Costs accepted and named: an apply can now fail because something is unreachable, which a self-contained artifact could not, so it must fail legibly — naming what it could not fetch and from where. And the lab needs a way to place images into a machine that also has no container runtime, both of which are lab-installation concerns and neither solved here. Research 012's build-time-versus-apply-time reframing narrows accordingly: it still holds for what a tailored installer contains, and no longer has to hold for images.
03-DESIGN / 01-to-be
The mesh being built toward. Every statement here traces to a record in
02-DECISIONS/; nothing arrives by drafting.
A document here describes an intention. What currently runs is in
00-as-is/, and the two are never merged — when something ships, the as-is
document is written and this one's status becomes implemented.
| Document | Covers | Rests on |
|---|---|---|
00-work-breakdown.md |
How the decomposition gets built, in what order, and where a human must look | ADR 0015 |
01-end-to-end-testing.md |
The lab: a real mesh a change can be run against before it reaches nodes | ADR 0016, 0029 |
02-scenario-declaration.md |
What a scenario declares — the underlay, and what to place on it | ADR 0031 |
03-scenario-lifecycle.md |
What happens to a scenario — raise, snapshot, restore, move, destroy | ADR 0032 |
04-lab-installation.md |
Getting the lab onto a clean machine, and why it verifies capability rather than installation | ADR 0008 |
05-the-node-host.md |
Tier 0 — the one thing installed by hand, and the only thing that changes a machine | ADR 0037 |
06-the-control-plane.md |
Tier 2 — what the term means, and the test for what belongs in it | ADR 0037 |
07-the-substrate.md |
Tier 1 — what the control plane consumes and cannot grant itself | ADR 0038 |
Not yet written
- The eight bounded contexts. ADR 0015 decides the decomposition; the per-context specifications do not exist yet. The work breakdown says in what order they are needed.
- Domain grouping outside the core. ADR 0017 settles the principle and explicitly does not settle the domain list. That is a research effort, not a design document, until it concludes.