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Container and Component View

The five planes, and the fact that generation and enforcement share nothing.

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Experience plane Surfaces Portal Backstage CLI Platform API Platform API one behaviour surface Entra Auth Generation plane — the paved road, which a team may leave Scaffolding Scaffolder Template Registry 5 paths, versioned Currency Drift Reporter Update PR Bot tracking repos only Enforcement plane — guardrails, which no team may leave Authoring Policy Repository single source Bundle Signer Evaluation Advisory Evaluator ≤ 90 s Admission Webhook ≤ 250 ms p99 Relief Exception Register expiring Reconciliation plane Workloads Argo CD sharded by team Progressive Delivery Infrastructure Terraform Runner module registry State and Locks Knowledge plane Catalog Descriptor Ingester Catalog Store PostgreSQL Runtime Reconciler declared vs observed Insight Metrics Store Data Explorer Audit Store immutable blob GitHub Enterprise intent + source Container Registry AKS Fleet Azure Resource Manager commits intent admits or denies reconciles Internal Developer Platform — Container and Component View Application we own Interface / broker Security / platform Data store Decision point External / third party synchronous Generation and enforcement are separate planes and share no component. They meet only at the runtime, which is the point of the whole design; the reconcilers' own applies are drawn in the data-flow and deployment views. v 1.0 · owner Platform Architecture · date 2026-09

The critical boundary

  • The generation plane and the enforcement plane have no component in common and no shared code path. They meet only at the runtime.
  • This is the architecture's defining decision: a control that lives inside a template is deleted by a fork, and the fork is a normal, reasonable act (ADR-05).
  • The exception register sits in the enforcement plane rather than beside the policy source, so that relief is granted through the same machinery that enforces (ADR-08).

Assumptions

  • Five golden paths at launch, eight within a year (stated assumption).
  • Argo CD sharded by team; three admission webhook replicas per cluster, each holding a local signed bundle (ADR-06).

Omitted

  • Reconciler-to-runtime applies, drawn in the data-flow and deployment views, so that this view can carry the plane boundaries without clutter.
  • The build plane's runners, which are ephemeral and belong to the release pipeline view.
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Solution Architecture v1.0 · Microsoft Azure · Platform Architecture · 2026-09 · 21 views · 16 architecture decision records08-platform-components