The artifact lifecycle — Publish → Pull → Verify

Every artifact — manifest, migrations, plugin licenses, tenant contract — follows the same three-phase lifecycle. No node is ever updated by pushing code: artifacts flow through a signed, verifiable channel and activate hot.

1 · Publish (Control Plane)

An admin (console or API client) publishes a new manifest version:

POST /api/v1/admin/tenants/:id/manifests
Authorization: Bearer <admin-session>
{ "manifest": { ... }, "migrations": [ { "name": "001_init.sql", "sql": "..." } ] }

What the Control Plane does, in one transaction:

1. Validation — JSON Schema + meta.version strictly greater than the currently active version (monotonic, no rollbacks by publish).
2. Packaging — manifest and SQL migrations are bundled; the package is the unit of distribution.
3. Signature — the package is signed Ed25519 with the Control Plane’s private key. The private key never leaves the cloud; edges only know the public key.
4. Activation — is_active swaps atomically to the new version; previous versions stay stored for audit.

A subscription in canceled state cannot publish: ingest and sync keep working, manifest pull returns the last valid state. The contract state is itself distributed as a signed tenant license.

2 · Pull (Edge node)

Every edge runs a periodic sync cycle — every 30 seconds:

GET /api/v1/sync/manifest   →  latest active manifest + signature
GET /api/v1/sync/licenses   →  plugin licenses + tenant contract license
Authorization: Bearer <edge api_key>   (+ tenant_id)

The same cycle drains the CDC outbox (POST /api/v1/sync/ingest) and doubles as the fleet heartbeat: the Control Plane records last_poll_at on each authenticated call. An edge that goes quiet is visible in the fleet console within a minute.

Offline by design: if the Control Plane is unreachable, the circuit breaker opens, events stay in the local outbox, and the edge keeps running the last verified manifest. Nothing is dropped — sync resumes on its own.

3 · Verify & activate (Edge node)

Before anything executes, the edge verifies:

1. Signature — Ed25519 check against the pinned public key. Invalid signature → package rejected, fail-closed, current manifest keeps running.
2. Version — must be greater than the installed one.
3. Snapshot — an automatic pre-migration snapshot of the affected tables is taken (snap_* schemas), so a bad migration is reversible.
4. Migrations — applied in a transaction; any error rolls everything back.
5. Hot swap — kernel.setManifest replaces the live manifest on the same process. No restart, no downtime, no lost session.

The tenant contract license is persisted locally (ax_tenant_license) so the edge enforces the right behavior — including the offline grace period — even while disconnected.

The full picture

 Dev/admin ──publish──▶ Control Plane ──sign──▶ signed package
                                                     │
 edge ◀──pull every 30s── TLS channel ◀───────────────┘
   │
   ├─ verify signature (Ed25519) ──fail──▶ reject, keep running
   ├─ snapshot → migrations (tx) ──fail──▶ rollback
   └─ hot swap manifest ──▶ new version live, zero downtime

Two reference verticals — a retail POS and a field-service work-order app — run today on the same engine through exactly this cycle.