Substrate Architecture #

Within a site, the substrate provides the shared infrastructure foundation — networking, compute, and services, all defined as code. The substrate is stateless — all configuration lives in source control and is applied through automation, so it can be reprovisioned from scratch at any time.

For site definitions (dvnt, dvntm) and the independence model, see Architecture.

Infrastructure Layers #

block-beta
    columns 2
    hdr["Substrate Infrastructure"]:2
    core["Core Services"]:1 cored["Network · Compute · Storage¹"]:1
    ext["Extended Services"]:1 extd["Observability · Automation · Access"]:1

¹ Storage is a planned future addition to core services.

Core Services #

The foundational infrastructure that must survive loss of all other tiers:

Network — Connectivity, segmentation, and foundational network services:

Routing and gateway — NAT, inter-segment routing, upstream connectivity
Firewall — Segment isolation and egress policy
DNS — Authoritative resolution for the substrate zone
DHCP — Static mappings for known hosts, dynamic pools per segment
Switching and wireless — VLAN trunking and wireless access

Compute — Virtualization hosts for management-plane and tenant workloads:

Extended services (observability, automation, access)
Tenant application VMs

Storage¹ — Shared and persistent storage for substrate consumers.

See Networking for substrate networking services (DNS, DHCP, firewall, VLAN routing, switching). See Network Segmentation for the segment model and trust hierarchy. See Core Services for core platform details.

Extended Services #

Additive services providing observability, automation, and access — runs on the management hypervisor:

Centralized logging and metrics
Automation runners and CI/CD
Jump hosts and access tooling

See Management Plane for how these services are provisioned and managed. See Extended Services for extended management services.

Child Documents #

Networking — Networking services: DNS, DHCP, firewall, VLAN routing, switching
Compute — Virtualization and compute model
Storage — Shared and persistent storage
Management Plane — Management plane overview, core and extended services