---
id: RAILIANCE-WP-0016
type: workplan
title: "Architecture cleanup backlog, WSJF-prioritized"
domain: financials
repo: railiance-platform
status: finished
owner: codex
topic_slug: railiance
created: "2026-08-12"
updated: "2026-08-15"
related_repos:
  - railiance-master
  - railiance-infra
  - railiance-cluster
  - railiance-enablement
  - railiance-telemetry
  - railiance-forge
state_hub_workstream_id: "8611b555-c681-496d-bfba-667198456837"
---

# RAILIANCE-WP-0016 - Architecture cleanup backlog, WSJF-prioritized

## Goal

Turn the INTENT/SCOPE gap analysis into an ordered backlog, so cleanup happens
highest-value-least-effort first rather than in the order things were noticed.

Source: `history/2026-08-12-intent-scope-gap-analysis.md`.

## Boundary — read before working this

This workplan **coordinates and orders**; it does not execute. Every item below
belongs to another repo, and each carries its owning repo in the table. S3 does
not own fleet architecture cleanup — `railiance-master` does.

This backlog lives here because the analysis was done here. **It should be
adopted by `railiance-master`**, and this workplan closed, once master has a
place for it. Until then it is better recorded than lost. S3 executes only the
items marked `railiance-platform`.

## Scoring method

WSJF = **Cost of Delay ÷ Job Size**, where Cost of Delay = Value + Time
Criticality + Risk Reduction. Each component 1–10, job size 1–10.

Two honesty notes. These are **judgments, not measurements** — their value is
the relative ordering and the explicit reasoning, not the arithmetic. And job
sizes for unbuilt things (telemetry, the conformance loop) are the least
reliable numbers here, because nobody has scoped them yet.

## The backlog

| # | Item | Owner | V | TC | RR | Size | **WSJF** |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | Converge the firewall allowlist; prune two stale grants | `railiance-infra` | 6 | 9 | 10 | 1 | **25.0** |
| 2 | Ratify the five pending decisions | `railiance-master` | 8 | 7 | 5 | 1 | **20.0** |
| 3 | Move the S1 goal off `railiance-hosts`, then retire it | `railiance-master` | 5 | 5 | 4 | 1 | **14.0** |
| 4 | Settle ArgoCD: adopt, retire, or relocate | `railiance-master` | 6 | 6 | 6 | 2 | **9.0** |
| 5 | Audit base role for further declared-vs-live drift | `railiance-infra` | 5 | 6 | 9 | 3 | **6.7** |
| 6 | `rapp.yaml` schema + family declaration validator | `railiance-master` | 8 | 5 | 7 | 3 | **6.7** |
| 7 | Reconcile hub capability attribution (C1) | `railiance-master` | 5 | 4 | 6 | 3 | **5.0** |
| 8 | Deployable coverage check: every deployable → one rapp | `railiance-master` | 7 | 4 | 7 | 4 | **4.5** |
| 9a | Telemetry: minimal metrics collection on railiance01 | `railiance-telemetry` | 8 | 5 | 5 | 4 | **4.5** |
| 9b | Telemetry: one expectation-based alert (needs 10b) | `railiance-telemetry` | 8 | 5 | 2 | 2 | **7.5** |
| ~~10a~~ | ~~Run `make verify`; tighten the UFW assertion~~ **DONE 2026-08-12** | `railiance-infra` | 8 | 7 | 9 | 1–2 | **12.0** |
| 10b | Schedule verification; route failures where they are seen | `railiance-infra` / Q7 owner | 7 | 6 | 8 | 3 | **7.0** |
| 11 | Consolidate the bootstrap path; sort inherited S2 content | `railiance-bootstrap` | 5 | 3 | 4 | 4 | **3.0** |
| 12 | Forge migration: `rapp-forgejo` + S4 layer transfer | `railiance-forge` / S4 | 6 | 4 | 4 | 5 | **2.8** |
| ~~13~~ | ~~Prove a restore end to end~~ **DONE 2026-08-15** | `railiance-platform` | 9 | 5 | 9 | 8 | **2.9** |
| ~~14~~ | ~~Valkey extraction + legacy postgresql-ha retirement~~ **DONE 2026-08-15** | `railiance-platform` | 5 | 4 | 4 | 5 | **2.6** |
| 15 | Sweep remaining Gitea prose (~31 files each) | `railiance-forge`, `railiance-apps` | 3 | 2 | 2 | 3 | **2.3** |
| 16 | Declare the Q6 cost boundary with `resource-control`/`fin-hub` | `railiance-master` | 4 | 3 | 3 | 4 | **2.5** |
| ~~17~~ | ~~Version S3 consumer service interfaces~~ **DONE 2026-08-15** | `railiance-platform` | 6 | 3 | 5 | 6 | **2.3** |
| 18 | Resolve the C4 ecosystem-modelling overlap | `railiance-master` / `railiance-fabric` | 4 | 3 | 4 | 5 | **2.2** |
| 19 | S4 build-out: pipeline templates, SDKs, portal | `railiance-enablement` | 7 | 3 | 4 | 9 | **1.6** |

## Reading the order

**Items 1–3 are nearly free and should happen first.** All three are "decided
but unmoved" — waiting on ratification or a single command, not on effort.
Item 1 in particular is a live security exposure: two standing firewall grants
point at addresses the ISP has since reassigned, and the fix is one convergence
run.

**Item 2 is the highest-leverage thing on the list.** Five pending
ratifications in `railiance-master` block items 6, 7, 8, 12 and parts of 9 and
10. It is a day of decisions that unblocks a quarter of the backlog.

**Items 9 and 10 are the strategic core** — Q2 and Q7, the two halves of the
self-evidencing thread five layers independently asked for. They were rescoped
on 2026-08-12 (see below) and item 10 turned out to be badly mis-sized: the
conformance checker already exists in `railiance-infra` and has simply not run
since 2026-03-09. **Slice 10a is now the highest-value item after the
ratifications** at WSJF 12.0.

**Item 13 is done, not blocked.** `RESOURCE-WP-0002` finished 2026-08-15.
Barman is live on `platform-pg`; T05 recorded full restore and PITR on
2026-08-14; daily backups have completed since. Pointer:
`docs/evidence/RAILIANCE-WP-0016-item13-restore-2026-08-15.md`.

**Item 19 is last and that is deliberate.** S4 build-out is the widest gap in
the family, but it is large, and item 12 gives S4 a smaller first
responsibility to prove delivery on. Building the portal before the forge
transfer would be starting at the hard end.

## Rescoping items 9 and 10 (2026-08-12)

### What was assumed

That Q2 Observability and Q7 Governance were both greenfield builds of
comparable size (5), sitting mid-table at WSJF 4.6.

### What is actually there

`railiance-infra` already has:

- `goss/baseline.yaml` — a host baseline assertion suite
- `ansible/roles/goss` + `ansible/playbooks/verify.yaml` — the runner
- `make verify` — runs it against all hosts, **commits TAP reports to git**, and
  exits non-zero on failure
- `reports/*.tap` — an evidence trail, last written **2026-03-09**

So a check-and-evidence mechanism exists and is wired. Two things are wrong with
it, and neither is a build:

1. **Nothing runs it.** Five months of silence. A verification suite that is not
   scheduled is a verification suite that does not exist.
2. **Its firewall assertion is too loose in exactly the place that mattered.**
   It asserts `/6443\/tcp.*ALLOW/` — that the port is allowed. It does not
   assert *from whom*. That regex passes identically whether 6443 is restricted
   to one operator address or open to the entire internet, which is precisely
   the drift that went undetected.

It would, however, have caught the *other* finding: it asserts
`Status: active`, and UFW is entirely inactive on `CoulombCore`.

### The rescoped slices

**Item 10 — conformance loop**

| Slice | Work | Size |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 10a | Run `make verify` against both hosts; tighten the UFW assertion to compare the live allowlist against `k3s_api_allowed_sources` rather than matching any ALLOW; fix what it surfaces | **2** |
| 10b | Schedule it, and route failures somewhere a human or agent actually sees | 3 |
| 10c | Extend to declaration conformance — rapp/rail/reef schema validation | blocked on item 6 |
| 10d | Deployable coverage: every live deployable maps to exactly one rapp | blocked on item 8 |

**Item 9 — telemetry**

| Slice | Work | Size |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 9a | Minimal metrics collection on `railiance01` | 4 |
| 9b | One expectation-based alert on the 10b path | 2 |
| 9c | Retention sufficient to prove a restore or rollout held | 3 |
| 9d | Dashboards and agent-queryable surfaces | 4 |

### The shared dependency worth naming

**10b and 9b are the same plumbing.** Both are "a check failed — now make that
visible to someone who can act." Building an alert path twice would be waste,
and building either of 9 or 10 *without* it produces logs nobody reads. That
path is the real first dependency for both, and it is small.

It also has an obvious candidate already in the fleet: the Goss suite commits
TAP evidence to git, and State Hub takes progress events. Neither is an alert,
but the gap between them is narrow.

### Revised positions

| Item | Old WSJF | New WSJF | Effect |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 10a run + tighten Goss | 4.6 (as part of 10) | **12.0** (V8 TC7 RR9 / size 2) | rises to 4th overall |
| 10b schedule + alert path | — | **7.0** (V7 TC6 RR8 / size 3) | rises above ArgoCD |
| 9b one real alert | — | **7.5** (V8 TC5 RR2 / size 2) | depends on 10b |
| 9a metrics collection | 4.6 | **4.5** (unchanged) | stays mid-table |

**Conclusion: item 10a should be done next, immediately after the ratifications.**
It is two points of effort, it directly closes the hole that produced this
session's security finding, and it converts an existing but dormant asset into a
working control. Item 9 is correctly mid-table and genuinely is a build.

### 10a outcome (2026-08-12) — the estimate held, and the check paid for itself immediately

Delivered in `railiance-infra`: `goss/baseline.yaml` became a template rendered
per host from the *same* inventory declaration that converges the host, so the
assertion cannot drift from what it checks. `verify.yaml` gained the
`vars_files` the bootstrap play already had — without it the firewall assertions
rendered empty and **silently asserted nothing**, which is worse than having no
check at all.

Result on `Railiance01`: 32 assertions, 31 pass. And the one failure is a real
defect the old assertion could never have seen:

> **Flannel VXLAN (`8472/udp`) is declared open to Anywhere**, with no source
> restriction — the same defect pattern as the k3s API rule. It is currently
> *absent* from the host, so converging the base role would **introduce** the
> exposure rather than correct drift.

Tracked as `RAIL-HO-WP-0009-T06`. Two things worth taking from this:

1. **The check earned its keep on first run** — it found a latent defect that
   convergence would have activated, in under two points of effort.
2. **It is an argument for finishing 10b.** This run happened because a human
   asked. Nothing schedules it, so the next latent defect waits for the next
   person who happens to look.

### The lesson worth keeping

The original size-5 estimate for item 10 was wrong because nobody looked. The
gap analysis correctly identified "no conformance loop" as a *capability* gap,
but the capability was two-thirds built and unrun. **Before sizing a gap as a
build, check whether it is actually an abandonment.**

## Tasks

```task
id: RAILIANCE-WP-0016-T01
status: done
priority: high
state_hub_task_id: "9fabf938-0479-4282-b1fe-88af0d2fbd36"
```

Produce the INTENT/SCOPE gap analysis across all `railiance-*` repos, comparing
declared aspiration against declared state against verified reality.

Delivered: `history/2026-08-12-intent-scope-gap-analysis.md`. Named the pattern
that organizes the backlog — every gap is *declared but unbuilt*, *built but
undeclared*, or *decided but unmoved*, and the third kind is cheapest to clear
while blocking the most.

```task
id: RAILIANCE-WP-0016-T02
status: done
priority: high
state_hub_task_id: "5b4d5f69-40fd-4af0-be23-325864cea48b"
```

Score and order the backlog by WSJF, recording owner and reasoning per item so
the ordering can be argued with rather than merely followed.

```task
id: RAILIANCE-WP-0016-T03
status: done
priority: high
state_hub_task_id: "9ede2fe5-5b6c-4792-b141-9c8f140c1a28"
```

Route the backlog to `railiance-master` for adoption, with the recommendation
that it takes items 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 16 and 18 — the ratification and taxonomy
items — and that this workplan closes once adopted.

```task
id: RAILIANCE-WP-0016-T04
status: done
priority: medium
state_hub_task_id: "aac02de1-6367-4767-b7ee-c980577e778f"
```

Rescope items 9 and 10 (telemetry MVP, conformance loop MVP) into deliverable
slices before committing to their position. Their size scores are the least
reliable on the list, and both are strategically central.

**Done 2026-08-12, and the answer changes the order.** See "Rescoping items 9
and 10" below. The headline: item 10 was mis-sized by a wide margin, because the
conformance checker **already exists** — `railiance-infra` has a Goss baseline
suite with a `make verify` target that runs it against all hosts and commits TAP
reports to git. It has not run since **2026-03-09**, five months. The work is not
to build a loop; it is to run what exists, tighten two assertions, and schedule
it.

```task
id: RAILIANCE-WP-0016-T05
status: done
priority: medium
state_hub_task_id: "a40faaf1-77db-43f5-a774-6ab3866d8e1d"
```

Execute the S3-owned items in WSJF order — 13 (blocked on `9c21c0e0`), 14, 17 —
and keep this table current as items complete or their sizes become known.

**Done 2026-08-15.** Item 13 unblocked by `RESOURCE-WP-0002` finish: restore
already proven as T05 there; live `platform-pg-daily` backups completing.
Item 14: Bitnami postgresql-ha deploy path fail-closed (never live on
railiance01); Valkey has no S2 instance to extract and no consumer, so
deploy is gated. Item 17: `docs/s3-consumer-interfaces.md` v1.0.0.

## Outcome

T01–T05 done. Routed to `railiance-master` (message `ac73b172`); master
took items 6 and 8 as WP-0021 and declined the rest. S3-owned items 13,
14 and 17 executed 2026-08-15 after the object-store purchase landed.
Workplan finished. Remaining backlog rows belong to other repos.
