The question is not whether the model covers our mesh but whether it can express any mesh. Audited against the axes a deployment varies along, with the standard being every property that changes how the mesh BEHAVES rather than every property a network has — bandwidth does not change correctness, MTU does. One real bug, now fixed. A segment with no gateway was read as the internet, which made an isolated network inexpressible: a LAN with no route out would have been treated as public and forced onto documentation addresses. Segments now state kind: public or private, and a private segment with no gateway is an island. A mesh spanning a site with no internet is a real topology. One modelling error, now corrected. The three positions were framed by ownership — a gateway you control versus one you do not. The axis is forwardability. Carrier-grade NAT is your own connection and is still unforwardable, so it belongs with the café network. Gateways gain forwardable:, independent of nat:, and publishing through an unforwardable one is a declaration error because that is the constraint being reproduced. Three genuine gaps recorded in priority order. Address family: cidr is implicitly v4, and a v6-only node is not exotic — a mesh that assumes v4 fails there completely rather than partially, which makes this a second world rather than a refinement. Expiring NAT mappings: without them keepalive behaviour is hoped for rather than tested, and for a mesh mostly behind NAT that is the fault that shows up after an idle night. MTU: tunnels fragment, and a smaller-MTU path establishes a connection that then silently drops large packets — the exact shape this effort exists to stop shipping. Latency and loss are deliberately out: they change performance, not correctness, and modelling them makes a network simulator rather than a fixture. Also adds a NAT primer, because the three positions are consequences of it and the document should not assume the reader already knows why a mesh dials outward and never inward.
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 |
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.