OpenOva Catalyst

A self-sufficient Kubernetes-native platform. Published as signed OCI Blueprints. Deployable as your own Sovereign.

Catalyst is the open-source platform built by OpenOva. It turns any Kubernetes cluster into a Sovereign: a self-contained control plane that hosts Organizations, Environments, and Applications via GitOps + Crossplane, with a unified UI/Git/API for users.

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Documentation

The canonical doc set is 10 top-level files plus subdirectories for ADRs, archive, ledger, lessons-learned, proposals, sub-runbooks, and session artifacts. Each top-level file has a single topic; no orphan satellite docs.

Document	What it covers
docs/GLOSSARY.md	Canonical terminology + banned terms — read first
docs/STATUS.md	What's built today vs design-only — read second
docs/ARCHITECTURE.md	Catalyst architecture, naming, component inventory, PowerDNS deployment, multi-region DNS (lua-records), ClusterMesh ID registry
docs/PRINCIPLES.md	The 15 inviolable engineering principles + anti-pattern receipts
docs/DOD.md	Definition of Done — 5 pillars + Phase 0/1/2 deterministic test + canonical FQDN patterns
docs/RUNBOOKS.md	Operator how-tos: Sovereign provisioning, Blueprint authoring, chart conventions, demo walks, failover recovery, troubleshooting matrix, doc-integrity audit cadence
docs/SECURITY.md	Identity (SPIFFE + Keycloak), secrets (OpenBao + ESO), secret-rotation procedures, multi-region OpenBao posture, threat model
docs/SRE.md	Operating a Sovereign — SLOs, incident response, progressive delivery, observability, alertmanager
docs/BUSINESS-STRATEGY.md	Product strategy + GTM + franchise model + voucher mechanism + product families map
docs/TECHNOLOGY-FORECAST-2027-2030.md	Component forecast 2027–2030

Subdirectories:

Directory	What it contains
docs/adr/	Architecture Decision Records (immutable; one file per decision)
docs/archive/	Superseded / historical / one-off docs (incl. validation-log, Catalyst-Zero provisioning plan, component-logos asset manifest, UI-regression-guards catalog)
docs/ledger/	Live verification ledger — TRUST.md + TRACKER.md, cron-refreshed
docs/lessons-learned/	Per-incident retrospectives
docs/proposals/	Active doc proposals not yet ratified into an ADR
docs/runbooks/	Sub-runbooks (incident playbooks split out by surface)
docs/sessions/	Date-stamped session artifacts (walks, retros, audit reports)

Heads-up before reading further: the architecture docs in this repo describe Catalyst's target state. Significant portions are not yet implemented — see docs/STATUS.md for what exists today vs what is design.

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The model in 60 seconds

OpenOva (the company) publishes Catalyst (the platform).
A deployed Catalyst is called a Sovereign.

A Sovereign has:
  - Organizations (multi-tenancy unit)
  - Environments (org-scoped, env-typed: prod/stg/uat/dev/poc)
  - Applications (installed Blueprints)
  - Blueprints (the App Store catalog — public + Org-private)

Users install Applications from Blueprints into Environments.
Blueprints can depend on Blueprints (arbitrary depth).
Each Environment is one Gitea repo + one or more vclusters.
Every state change is a Git commit.
Every UI surface reads from a single CQRS projection.

Same code runs in every Sovereign:
  - openova         (run by us; SaaS Organizations)
  - omantel         (run by Omantel; SME Organizations across Oman)
  - bankdhofar      (run by the bank; internal Organizations)
  - your-company    (run by you, on infrastructure you choose)

See docs/GLOSSARY.md for every term, docs/ARCHITECTURE.md for the full picture.

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What's in this repo

openova/
├── core/              # Catalyst control-plane application (Go) — design-stage; mostly placeholders today
├── platform/          # Component Blueprint folders (one folder per upstream OSS project)
├── products/          # Composite Blueprint folders OpenOva publishes
│   ├── catalyst/      # The Catalyst control plane itself, target umbrella Blueprint
│   ├── cortex/        # AI Hub (LLM serving, RAG, AI safety)
│   ├── axon/          # SaaS LLM Gateway (default upstream for Cortex)
│   ├── fingate/       # Open Banking (PSD2/FAPI sandbox)
│   ├── fabric/        # Data & Integration (event-driven + lakehouse)
│   └── relay/         # Communication (email, video, chat, WebRTC)
│                      # (specter and exodus are deliverable services, not Blueprints in this layout)
└── docs/              # Platform documentation

Each folder under platform/ and products/ is the source of one Blueprint, published from CI as a signed OCI artifact at ghcr.io/openova-io/bp-<name>:<semver> (the bp- prefix is added to the OCI artifact name; folder names stay short). Per-folder isolation is provided at the OCI artifact layer, not the Git repo layer — this is a monorepo with per-Blueprint fan-out, not a meta-repo of separate Git repositories. See docs/RUNBOOKS.md §2 for the folder layout contract.

Today, the 12-component bootstrap kit (cilium, cert-manager, flux, crossplane, sealed-secrets, spire, nats-jetstream, openbao, keycloak, gitea, powerdns + the bp-catalyst-platform umbrella under products/catalyst/) ships with full chart/ + blueprint.yaml per docs/STATUS.md §7, plus products/axon/ and the external-dns leaf chart. The remaining 45 platform components and the cortex / fabric / fingate / relay product folders are design-stage — README only — until each lands its Blueprint manifest, chart, Compositions, and CI fan-out.

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Stack at a glance

Layer	Technology
Container runtime	k3s (k8s-conformant), containerd
CNI / Service Mesh	Cilium (eBPF mTLS, L7 policies, Gateway API)
GitOps	Flux (per-vcluster, lightweight)
Git	Gitea (per-Sovereign, hosts Blueprint mirror + per-Environment repos)
IaC for non-K8s	Crossplane (the only IaC; not user-facing)
Bootstrap IaC	OpenTofu (one-shot, archived after Phase 0)
Multi-tenancy	vcluster (one per Organization per host cluster)
Identity (workloads)	SPIFFE/SPIRE (5-min rotating SVIDs, mTLS everywhere)
Identity (users)	Keycloak (per-Org for SME, per-Sovereign for corporate)
Secrets	OpenBao (Apache 2.0; independent Raft per region, no stretched cluster) + External Secrets Operator
Event spine	NATS JetStream (Apache 2.0; pub/sub + KV; per-Org accounts)
TLS	cert-manager + Let's Encrypt or corporate CA
Policy	Kyverno
Supply chain	cosign (Sigstore), Syft + Grype SBOM, Trivy scans
Runtime security	Falco (eBPF)
Observability	OpenTelemetry → Grafana stack (Alloy + Loki + Mimir + Tempo)
WAF	Coraza (OWASP CRS)
DNS	PowerDNS authoritative per Sovereign zone + DNSSEC + lua-records (ifurlup, pickclosest); pool-domain-manager allocates pool subdomains and flips parent-zone NS via registrar adapters (Cloudflare / Namecheap / GoDaddy / OVH / Dynadot) — see docs/ARCHITECTURE.md §13 (PowerDNS deployment) + §14 (multi-region DNS)
Backup	Velero (to SeaweedFS, which routes the cold tier to cloud archival S3)
Container registry	Harbor

For the full component list and trends see docs/ARCHITECTURE.md and docs/TECHNOLOGY-FORECAST-2027-2030.md.

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Cloud providers

Provider	Status
Hetzner Cloud	Available (most-tested path)
AWS / GCP / Azure	Crossplane providers available; full path coming
Oracle Cloud (OCI)	Crossplane provider available; full path coming
Huawei Cloud	Crossplane provider available; full path coming

All providers reach Catalyst via the same Crossplane abstraction; Sovereign provisioning details per provider are in docs/RUNBOOKS.md §8 (Bring up a Sovereign).

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Getting started

Try it (managed)

Visit marketplace.openova.io to install Applications on the openova Sovereign without any infrastructure setup. SaaS journey for SMEs and evaluations.

Run your own Sovereign

1. Provision via catalyst-provisioner.openova.io (managed bootstrap), OR
2. Self-host bp-catalyst-provisioner in your own infrastructure (air-gap path).

Then follow the procedure in docs/RUNBOOKS.md §8 (Bring up a Sovereign).

Build a Blueprint

See docs/RUNBOOKS.md. A Blueprint is a folder under platform/<name>/ (or products/<name>/) in this monorepo containing blueprint.yaml + manifests (Helm chart or Kustomize base) + (optional) Crossplane Compositions. CI signs each folder's contents and publishes to OCI as ghcr.io/openova-io/bp-<name>:<semver>. Catalyst's blueprint-controller picks it up automatically. Org-private Blueprints follow the same shape inside per-Sovereign Gitea repos.

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License

All Blueprints and the Catalyst control plane are open source. Each component carries its own upstream license (typically Apache 2.0, MPL 2.0, or BSD-3); see each component's LICENSE file.

OpenOva charges for support, managed operations, and expert services — never for access to code. See docs/BUSINESS-STRATEGY.md §10.

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Contributing

PRs welcome. The contribution path for Blueprints (including Crossplane Compositions) is documented in docs/RUNBOOKS.md §13. Issues and discussions on GitHub.

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Cloud-native is the foundation. Catalyst is how you operate it.