Reference Architecture

The Enterprise Anchors Platform (EAP) implements a Context-Based Mesh topology. It rejects the centralized API Gateway model in favor of a distributed Sidecar pattern, ensuring governance happens at the edge with zero latency penalty for internal traffic.

1. The Data Plane (The Edge)

The Data Plane handles the high-volume inference and action traffic. It distributes enforcement to the “Edge”—specifically to the Anchored-Agents and Gateways.

• Component: Anchor Sidecar
• Role: A deterministic, lightweight proxy—a “Governance Wrapper”—that encapsulates the AI Agent. By forcing all ingress (prompts) and egress (actions) through this deterministic Anchor, the platform ensures the probabilistic agent can never bypass organizational controls.
• Responsibility:
  • Identity Injection: Attaching the SPIFFE ID to outbound requests.
  • Context Fetching: Retrieving the current Autonomy Verdict.
  • Evidence Emission: Writing the Decision Spine events to the stream.
• Edge Enforcement: Policies are cached locally within the Data Plane components. This ensures that even if the Control Plane goes offline, the Agents continue to operate safely (Fail-Closed) without adding network latency to every call.

2. The Control Plane (The Brain)

The Control Plane is the brain of the operation. It does not process user prompts; it processes metadata about the prompts to maintain the integrity of the mesh.

• Component: Enterprise Anchors Engine (Autonomy Manager, Policy Service, Identity Broker, Evidence Registry)
• Role: Manages state, calculates trust, and persists evidence.
• Responsibility:
  • Identity Broker: Issues short-lived, verifiable identities (e.g., SPIFFE IDs/SVIDs) to every agent and human.
  • Policy Service: The centralized repository for Policy-as-Code. It operates on a GitOps model, compiling high-level rules into optimized formats for the Gateways.
  • Autonomy Manager: Ingests metrics to compute the Autonomy Bundle (aggregating Safety, Sigma, and KRIs), and issues the Verdict (Scale, Sustain, Rollback).
  • Evidence Registry: An immutable, append-only ledger that acts as a stream consumer, ingesting events and asynchronously building the audit trail.

3. The Nervous System (Event Bus)

• Role: An event-driven, asynchronous messaging layer that decouples the Edge from the Brain. Ensures that if the Control Plane goes offline, the Agents continue to function (Fail-Closed based on cached policy) without data loss.
• Design Principle: The Decision Spine is not written to a database synchronously (which adds latency). Instead, Anchors emit signed “Decision Events” to a high-throughput stream, ensuring governance telemetry has zero impact on the agent’s inference performance.