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ARCHITECTURE

Deployment Topologies

How to run Aether in dev, production HA, hybrid cloud, and edge scenarios.

See also: Architecture · Production Reference · Helm chart helm/aether/

Single-node (development)

Developer laptop / VM
├── aether serve (API :5090 + dashboard)
├── Podman workloads
└── ~/.aether/state.json

Use when: Local dev, POC, demos.
Limits: No HA; state on local disk.

Production HA

                    ┌─────────────┐
                    │  Ingress    │
                    │  (TLS)      │
                    └──────┬──────┘
           ┌───────────────┼───────────────┐
           ▼               ▼               ▼
    ┌────────────┐  ┌────────────┐  ┌────────────┐
    │ aether-api │  │ aether-api │  │ aether-api │
    │  replica   │  │  replica   │  │  replica   │
    └─────┬──────┘  └─────┬──────┘  └─────┬──────┘
          │               │               │
          └───────────────┼───────────────┘
                          ▼
              ┌───────────────────────┐
              │ PostgreSQL (state)    │
              │ Redis (sessions/SSE)  │
              └───────────────────────┘
                          │
                    ┌───────┴───────┐
                    ▼               ▼
               Kubernetes       KubeVirt
               target clusters  clusters

Ship today: Helm values for Postgres, Redis, OIDC/SAML, TLS — see Enterprise security and helm/aether.

Hybrid cloud

  • Control plane: HA Aether in primary region
  • Workloads: runtime.allow + kubeconfig contexts per cluster
  • GitOps: Reconcile specs from repo to multiple targets

Operators use dashboard Clusters page for context inventory (kubeconfig-based).

Edge (roadmap)

Component Status
Central API + dashboard Ship
Multi-cluster kubeconfig Ship
Lightweight edge agent Roadmap
Offline reconcile queue Roadmap

Document edge agents as target architecture only — not claimed as shipped.

Topology selection

Requirement Topology
Laptop demo Single-node
Team staging Single-node + shared K8s
Enterprise prod HA + Postgres
Multi-region HA + per-region kube contexts
Air-gapped See AIR-GAPPED.md