jschoubben
93470f6162
The bootstrap's sharpest open question, and the framing was wrong. "State on this machine" was being read as the filesystem and the service manager. A service running on this machine IS part of this machine — writing a file and creating a database in a local store differ in mechanism, not in scope. The real question was underneath: must the host learn what a database is? It must not. Giving it a `database` resource type means tier 0 knows Postgres, then a bucket, then a virtual host — the host acquiring the substrate's vocabulary one service at a time, which is what ADR 0037 exists to stop. So the bundle declares an ACTION and the host runs it and verifies it. What a database means stays with the module that provides one; the host knows only how to run a declared action against something local and check the result. Its vocabulary grows by one shape rather than by one resource type per service. Actions are permitted in the bundle and forbidden over the link, and the asymmetry is deliberate. A bundle arrives WITH the binary: anyone able to put a hostile action in it could equally have put it in the host itself, so refusing actions there buys nothing and costs the bootstrap. The link is a separate party, reachable separately, and an action there is the unbounded blast radius ADR 0039 refuses. That decision stands unchanged. And ongoing provisioning is not the host's at all — the control plane does it once a mesh exists — so the asymmetry costs nothing. Which dissolves the earlier worry about one mechanism with a tier boundary inside it: there are two mechanisms, with different actors, scopes and trust models, and that is the answer rather than a compromise. Named rather than hidden: this is the escape hatch research 011 warned about, arbitrary code in the place hardest to remove later. It is bounded by being bundle-only and by every action having to declare how it verifies itself, and that boundary is the whole defence.
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.