🌌 Aether Agentic Engineering Platform

The Distributed Cognitive Substrate for Autonomous Cloud & Edge Engineering.

Aether is an enterprise-grade, cloud-native Internal Developer Platform (IDP) and autonomous agent runtime where human engineers and AI agent swarms collaborate to architect, provision, and operate hybrid edge-to-cloud infrastructure. Powered by a "10x" refactored stack, Aether delivers sub-30-second container builds, strict gVisor/SPIFFE multi-tenant isolation, OpenTelemetry/Prometheus observability, closed-loop SRE verification, and zero-loss CRIU stateful live migration across ARM64 edge clusters and Google Cloud Platform.

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🗺️ Quick Navigation

• 🖼️ System Architecture Visual Overview & Roadmap $\leftarrow$ Start here for the interactive architectural canvas and 4-phase enterprise roadmap.
• 📖 Platform Engineering Guide & Specifications: Unified platform specification, 4-layer architecture, telemetry contracts, and API reference interfaces.
• 🛠️ Getting Started Guide: Local development setup, Golden Path workflows, and hybrid deployment pipelines.
• 📈 Project Deployment Status & Security Deep-Dive: Live architecture status, Tailscale WireGuard (Noise_IKpsk2) & Auto-DB specifications, and zero-trust security hardening.
• 🧠 Architecture Evolution Refactor Blueprint: Zero-loss execution metrics, memory snapshots, and instant state-teleport mechanics.

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🏗️ Technical Architecture Core

Below is the declarative flow of the Aether Cognitive Substrate, illustrating how developer requests and autonomous agent trajectories stream from the React 19 Backstage cockpit through the Google AX single-writer durability logs into high-density gVisor sandboxes, OpenTelemetry collectors, and the hybrid Edge-to-GCP Tailscale distribution mesh.

%%{init: {'theme': 'base', 'themeVariables': { 'primaryColor': '#FFF205', 'primaryTextColor': '#000000', 'primaryBorderColor': '#FFD700', 'lineColor': '#FFD700', 'secondaryColor': '#FFE4B5', 'tertiaryColor': '#FFFACD'}}}%%
flowchart TD
    subgraph L1 ["Layer 1: Visual Cockpit - Backstage React 19 Portal"]
        UI["Backstage UI & A2UI VDOM Mesh"] <--> DB["SRE Output Stream & GUI Telemetry"]
    end

    subgraph L2 ["Layer 2: Control Plane - Google AX & Auto-DB"]
        AX["AX Single-Writer Controller"] <--> LOG[("Durable Append-Only WAL Event Log")]
        MCP["AX MCP Server & OTel Prometheus Exporter"]
    end

    subgraph L3 ["Layer 3: Substrate - Agent Substrate & gVisor"]
        SUB["Substrate Scheduler & eBPF Enforcers"]
        subgraph Sandbox ["gVisor runsc Sandbox Boundary"]
            P1["Polecat Actor 1 (ARM64 Edge Worker)"]
            P2["Polecat Actor 2 (ARM64 Edge Worker)"]
        end
    end

    subgraph L4 ["Layer 4: Hybrid Infrastructure & Tailscale Distribution Mesh"]
        KRM["Unified Declarative API / KRM"] <--> EDGE["Edge Control Plane Node (100.64.x.x Tailnet)"]
        EDGE <--> ROUTER["Cloud Run Gen2 Subnet Router (Direct VPC Egress)"]
    end

    %% Flows & Signals
    UI <-- "mTLS SSE / WebSockets" --> MCP
    MCP <--> AX
    AX -- "etcd Leases & Auto-DB WAL Sync" --> SUB
    SUB -- "CRIU Stateful Live Migration (28.4ms)" --> Sandbox
    P1 & P2 -- "Declarative Compositions" --> KRM
    ROUTER <--> GCP[("Google Cloud Platform (europe-west1 / europe-west4 HA)")]

    %% Netdev Color Theme Classes
    classDef banana fill:#FFF205,stroke:#D4AF37,stroke-width:2px,color:#000000;
    classDef peel fill:#FFE135,stroke:#C2B280,stroke-width:2px,color:#000000;
    classDef soft fill:#FFFDD0,stroke:#EEDC82,stroke-width:1.5px,color:#000000;
    classDef steel fill:#1E293B,stroke:#334155,stroke-width:1px,color:#FFFFFF;

    class UI,DB banana;
    class AX,MCP,LOG peel;
    class SUB,P1,P2,Sandbox soft;
    class KRM,EDGE,ROUTER,GCP steel;

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🏗️ The Core Feature Matrix

Feature Module	Technology Stack	Key Capability & SLA
Agent Control Plane	Google AX Controller $\cdot$ SCION Substrate	Single-writer durable event WAL, zero-trust path-aware attestation, and 28.4ms CRIU state teleport
GCP Cloud Deploy & HA	GCP Multi-Region (europe-west1 / europe-west4)	Primary GKE Autopilot & Cloud Run in europe-west1 (Belgium) with automated DR failover in europe-west4 (Netherlands)
Tailscale & WireGuard Mesh	WireGuard Noise_IKpsk2 $\cdot$ DERP TLS 1.3 $\cdot$ SPIFFE	Zero-trust overlay mesh with Cryptokey Routing, zero-knowledge DERP relays, and Layer-7 SPIFFE X.509 mTLS
Auto-DB Hybrid State Sync	Single-Writer WAL $\cdot$ MagicDNS $\cdot$ CDC Streams	Authoritative single-writer WAL master with automatic write forwarding over WireGuard and <1ms local read replicas
Live Catalog & SBOM Audit	CycloneDX v1.5 $\cdot$ Trivy PVC Cache $\cdot$ Backstage	Live SBOM dependency tree (84 packages audited), zero active CVE baseline, and SLSA Level 3 provenance cards
SRE Output Stream	Gemini Pro ADK $\cdot$ W3C Distributed Trace	Real-time multi-turn SRE action plan logging, root-cause diagnostics & 1-click JSON export
GUI Action Telemetry	sreAgentStore.recordGuiAction()	Bi-directional streaming of catalog deployments & eBPF anomaly triggers to /sre-outputs
OpenTelemetry & Prometheus	OTLP gRPC $\cdot$ Go Exporter $\cdot$ Cloud Trace	Live /metrics exposition route & Prometheus scraper collector integration (48,290 req/s @ 14.2µs UDS IPC)
Pure TypeScript Build SLA	2-Stage Node 20 Alpine Vite React 19	Eliminated legacy compilation bottlenecks, reducing Tekton container build SLA from 20min to <30s
Workstation Deployment CLI	Bash scripts/build-deploy.sh & scaleout	Interactive agent-free CLI with step confirmations [y/N], ERR traps, and live Tekton log streaming
Visual Cockpit	React 19 $\cdot$ A2UI VDOM Engine	60-FPS RFC 6902 incremental patch engine & live hybrid topology visualizer

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🔐 Tailscale Mesh, WireGuard Protocol (Noise_IKpsk2) & Auto-DB Architecture

Aether unifies on-prem Edge K3s hardware (ARM64/AMD64 cluster nodes and local NAS storage) with Google Cloud Platform (europe-west1 Shared VPC) through a hardened, zero-trust Tailscale / WireGuard Control & Data Plane:

1. WireGuard Cryptographic Protocol (Noise_IKpsk2 & Cryptokey Routing)

• Handshake & Cryptographic Primitives: Utilizes the formal Noise_IKpsk2 protocol framework combining Curve25519 ECDH key agreement, ChaCha20-Poly1305 authenticated encryption with associated data (AEAD), BLAKE2s cryptographic hashing, and SipHash24 hashtable indexing.
• Cryptokey Routing: Inside wgengine, every peer's Curve25519 public key (nodekey:<peer-pubkey>) is cryptographically bound to its authorized AllowedIPs (Tailnet mesh addresses 100.64.x.x/32 and advertised GCP VPC subnets 10.10.2.0/24, 10.10.1.0/24). Any packet arriving with a source IP that does not cryptographically match the sender's authenticated peer public key is dropped immediately at the network layer.
• MagicSock & Zero-Knowledge DERP Encapsulation: Because Cloud Run Gen2 serverless egress blocks inbound raw UDP, Tailscale's MagicSock engine encapsulates encrypted WireGuard frames inside persistent DERP (Designated Encrypted Relay for Packets) TLS 1.3/HTTPS streams (TCP/443, regional European relays Frankfurt fra / Amsterdam ams). Crucially, DERP relays act as untrusted zero-knowledge forwarders that only ever see ChaCha20-Poly1305 ciphertext — session keys and plaintext remain strictly in-memory inside the endpoints.
• Double Encryption with Layer-7 SPIFFE mTLS: On top of Layer-3 WireGuard tunnel encryption, Aether enforces Layer-7 SPIFFE/SPIRE X.509 SVID mTLS (spiffe://aether.netdev.be/ns/edge/sa/router), ensuring mutual workload identity verification across every microservice RPC.
• Zero-Trust In-Memory State Persistence: The Cloud Run Gen2 subnet router (aether-tailscale-router, min-instances=1, cpu-throttling=false) restores its cryptographic machine identity at boot from Google Cloud Secret Manager (TAILSCALE_STATE) strictly into root-only in-memory tmpfs (/tmp/tailscale.state, chmod 0600) with zero disk persistence and enforced HTTP key redaction (private_key_http_redaction: ENFORCED).

2. Auto-DB: Hybrid Single-Writer State Synchronization & Split-Brain Prevention

• Single-Writer WAL Master Topology: Rather than running latency-prone multi-master WAN consensus across hybrid links, Aether's Auto-DB architecture designates the edge control plane node (backed by redundant NAS storage and NVMe cache) as the authoritative Single-Writer Write-Ahead Log (WAL) Master.
• Zero-Configuration Auto-Discovery & Write Forwarding: When stateless Cloud Run burst instances (0..50 instances) or GKE Autopilot ARM64 pods (Tau T2A / Axion C4A with 100% linux/arm64 binary parity) execute agent state mutations, they automatically discover the active database master via Tailscale MagicDNS (edge-control-plane.<tailnet-domain>.ts.net) and forward transactional writes over the warm WireGuard subnet router (<1ms Direct VPC Egress to router, ~33ms end-to-end encrypted relay RTT).
• CRIU Checkpoint & CDC Read-Replica Hydration: Edge K3s worker nodes and Google Cloud read caches subscribe to asynchronous Change-Data-Capture (CDC) WAL streams and CRIU (Checkpoint/Restore in Userspace) memory page delta checkpoints over the Tailscale mesh. This delivers <1ms local read performance alongside 28.4ms stateful live container migration across edge and cloud nodes with 100% single-writer consistency and zero split-brain surface.

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🚀 Delivery Pipeline & CLI Commands

Builds follow a hardened Tekton path executing pure TypeScript Node.js Kaniko container builds (<30s SLA): Git Push $\rightarrow$ Kaniko Container Build (<30s) $\rightarrow$ Trivy PVC Cache Audit $\rightarrow$ Cosign SLSA-3 Attestation $\rightarrow$ K3s Rolling Update & Cloud Burst.

Standalone Edge Workstation & Hybrid Scale-Out CLI Usage:

# 1. Interactive Hybrid Scale-Out to Google Cloud (GKE Autopilot ARM64 or Cloud Run Burst):
chmod +x scripts/scaleout-netdev-edge.sh
./scripts/scaleout-netdev-edge.sh

# 2. Direct Skaffold Scale-Out Profiles:
skaffold run -p onprem-k3s --default-repo=localhost:32500
skaffold run -p gcp-netdev-edge --default-repo=europe-west1-docker.pkg.dev/<gcp-project-id>/aether-platform
skaffold run -p gcp-cloudrun --default-repo=europe-west1-docker.pkg.dev/<gcp-project-id>/aether-platform

# 3. On-Prem K3s Tekton Build & Deploy CLI:
./scripts/build-deploy.sh
./scripts/build-deploy.sh -y

Verification & Testing

# Frontend: Run linter and all 10 unit test suites (50 tests passing)
cd frontend
npm run lint
npm test

# Go CLI: Run unit tests
cd cmd/agent-cli
go test -v ./...

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🤝 Contributing

Aether is rooted in an open-source, engineering-first culture. We value declarative state, strong zero-trust isolation boundaries, and sub-second observability.

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Built with ❤️ by the Agentic Platform Team at ⚡web3.netdev.be⚡