ops-warden/docs/adr/README.md
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ADR-0006: enforcement is zone-scoped; defer the policy.enabled flip
flex-auth enforced its ops-warden pin (FLEX-WP-0016 T03) and the gate verified
clean against it: readiness exits 0, decision:f3f7c88f9585582a, anonymous
/v1/check now 401. Everything needed to set policy.enabled: true was in place.

It stays false, by decision. policy.enabled is a single repo-wide boolean, and
with fail_closed: true it makes flex-auth a hard dependency of every warden
sign — including the certs the ops-bridge tunnels depend on, one of which
carries the policy call itself. Uniform enforcement across an estate being
actively rebuilt hardens the access needed to perform the rebuild.

The repo already refuses one-dimensional posture: WP-0015 shipped environment
and maturity axes, WP-0029 added organization_posture. A global flag ignores all
three. ADR-0006 records that enforcement belongs to a zone, and binds future
work — a zone-blind enforcement flag is out of order, not merely unwise.

WARDEN-WP-0032 drafts the zone model, leading with the ownership question:
whether this is ops-warden's to own or NetKingdom canon to consume (ADR-0005).
WP-0031 is finished with T05 cancelled and resuming as WP-0032-T05.

Also replaces the hand-run kubectl port-forward with a managed ops-bridge
tunnel, flex-auth-ops-warden-railiance01 (-L 19090:10.43.1.165:8080).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-19 20:31:28 +02:00

3.6 KiB

ops-warden architecture decision records

This directory holds the rules ops-warden owns — the decisions this repo made, is bound by, and is responsible for changing.

Why these exist as ADRs rather than wiki prose

Until 2026-08-18 every rule in this list lived in wiki prose, a workplan, or a comment at the top of registry/routing/catalog.yaml. All of them were being followed. None of them was addressable: a reader outside ops-warden could not cite one, could not tell whether it was current, and could not tell whether it was ours to change or someone else's that we merely obey.

That distinction is the point of this directory. It matters in both directions:

  • A rule we own, mistaken for inherited canon, never gets fixed. We wait for an owner who does not exist.
  • Inherited canon, mistaken for ours, gets quietly bent. We change something we had no authority over, and the drift is invisible until it breaks a repo that trusted the canonical version.

Owned versus inherited

Every ADR here carries owner: in its frontmatter. It is the load-bearing field.

owner: Meaning How it changes
ops-warden Ours. We decided it, we are bound by it, and we may change it A new ADR that supersedes this one. Never an edit-in-place that rewrites a decision
anything else Inherited. We follow it; we do not own it Through that owner's process. We may dispute it — we may not amend it

Everything currently in this directory is owner: ops-warden. Rules we follow but do not own — NetKingdom canon, the IAM profile, the credential-management standard — are not copied here. They are cited. Copying inherited canon into our own ADR directory would recreate exactly the second-source-of-truth failure that ADR-0001 exists to prevent.

Superseding one of these

A decision here changed the behaviour of other repos, so retracting it silently is not available. Write a new ADR, set the old one's status: superseded and successor:, and leave it in place. Superseded is a lifecycle state; deletion is not. policy-nexus publishes the history, and a reader asking "what did this say when we made that decision" must be able to find out.

Relationship to .claude/rules/

.claude/rules/*.md are agent-facing operational instructions. They tell an agent what to do in a session. They are derived from these ADRs and should cite them rather than restate the reasoning. If the two disagree, the ADR is right and the rule file is a defect.

Publication

These are publishable through policy-nexus at policy.coulomb.social, which requires title, status and owner on every document and renders Owner as a column in its index. The ownership knowledge therefore survives publication rather than being a local convention that evaporates at the repo boundary.

policy-nexus publishes; it never writes back. The file in this directory is the source of truth. If the site and this directory disagree, this directory is right and the publication is a defect.

ADR Rule Binds
ADR-0001 The routing catalog is a pointer layer, never a second copy of an owner's procedure ops-warden, and every repo contributing a catalog entry
ADR-0002 ops-warden is a transparent conduit, never a secret broker ops-warden
ADR-0003 Cover gaps, but never silently own them ops-warden
ADR-0004 High-risk lanes refuse raw value streaming to agent sessions ops-warden, and any agent runtime calling warden access
ADR-0005 Implement one lane narrowly, route everything else ops-warden
ADR-0006 Enforcement is zone-scoped, never a global flag ops-warden