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ADR-007: Management Plane as Fleet Hub

Status: Approved (amended by ADR-010, ADR-012, and repository split)

Date: 2026-06-30

Decision

The 7KGroup Management Plane is a lightweight operational hub. It does NOT run client workloads, client Backstage instances, or client workload infrastructure. It manages the fleet, aggregates observability, and owns the lifecycle of client control-plane infrastructure.

Management-plane configuration is stored in the dedicated 7k-inari-fleet repository and is restricted to 7KGroup platform operators. Client overlays, templates, and architecture documentation remain in 7k-inari.

Responsibilities

  • Client control-plane infrastructure lifecycle
  • AWS account / org resources (manual or scripted for v1)
  • VPC, subnets, routing, security groups
  • EKS control plane and node groups (including upgrades)
  • Cluster-level IAM roles and OIDC provider
  • Installation of client-local ArgoCD
  • Seeding the initial ArgoCD Application pointing to clients/<client-id>/overlays/<env>/
  • Mimir (metrics store, multi-tenant)
  • Loki (logs store, multi-tenant)
  • Grafana (fleet-wide dashboards)
  • Vault (mTLS CA + management-plane secret store)
  • Central Keycloak (fallback identity directory)
  • Hiroba Catalog Git repository reference (source of truth)
  • Management-plane internal ArgoCD (deploys only management-plane components)

Explicitly NOT in Management Plane

  • Client Backstage instances
  • Client Crossplane control planes (for workload infrastructure)
  • Client ArgoCD configuration, Application contents, or version upgrades after seeding
  • Cloud Factory XRD execution (target state, not v1)
  • Client workload data
  • Workload-level IAM roles (e.g., IRSA roles for Crossplane providers)

Ownership Boundary

Layer Owned By
AWS account, VPC, EKS, node groups, cluster IAM Management-plane Crossplane
ArgoCD installation + initial Application Management-plane Crossplane
ArgoCD configuration, upgrades, and Application contents Client overlay via client-local ArgoCD
Backstage, Dex, Alloy, workload Crossplane, Hiroba XRDs Client overlay via client-local ArgoCD
Observability ingestion Client Alloy → management-plane Mimir/Loki

Notes

Originally this ADR included an ArgoCD Fleet Hub that deployed to client clusters. ADR-010 moved deployment responsibility to a client-local ArgoCD pulling from the central 7k-inari repository. ADR-012 added management-plane Crossplane for client cluster provisioning. The management-plane configuration was subsequently moved to a dedicated repository (7k-inari-fleet) to enforce access control and separate operator concerns from client overlays.