thesabear
20f39f3b6d
Completes the docs/ set - all 16 systems now have a full deep-dive page in the diagram+callout+table style. Architecture overview covers the 4 trust boundaries and 2 traffic planes; IaC pipeline is a fresh Packer->Terraform->Ansible writeup replacing the stale old-content/ snapshot; disaster recovery covers the 3 independent backup layers and the deliberately decoupled OS/app upgrade systems.
3.8 KiB
📐 Architecture Overview
Note
The stable, directional laws governing how traffic moves through the fleet — re-verified against live infrastructure, not assumed from older documentation. Two real corrections were caught and fixed the last time this was checked, which is exactly the point of re-verifying rather than trusting a prior write-up forever.
Dependency graph
flowchart TD
Internet(["Internet"]) --> Edge["Edge Firewall<br/>NAT · public reverse proxy · NTP · DHCP"]
Edge --> LAN["LAN"]
LAN --> DNS["Internal DNS"]
LAN --> Vault["Vault"]
DNS --> Vault
Vault --> Apps["App Host<br/>~40 stacks"]
LAN --> FileServer["File Server"]
DNS --> FileServer
Vault --> Automation["Automation Host"]
LAN --> Automation
Apps --> InternalProxy["Internal reverse-proxy zone"]
Apps --> SSO["SSO"]
Automation --> Gitea["Git hosting<br/>internal + public mirror"]
Vault --> EdgeProxy["User-facing reverse proxy<br/>mTLS"]
DNS --> EdgeProxy
Apps -.proxied by.-> EdgeProxy
SSO -.auth gate via.-> EdgeProxy
Apps -.reports to.-> Monitoring["Monitoring"]
Automation -.reports to.-> Monitoring
FileServer -.reports to.-> Monitoring
EdgeProxy -.reports to.-> Monitoring
Vault -.reports to.-> Monitoring
DNS -.reports to.-> Monitoring
Apps -.reports to.-> Wazuh["Security Monitoring"]
Automation -.reports to.-> Wazuh
FileServer -.reports to.-> Wazuh
EdgeProxy -.reports to.-> Wazuh
Vault -.reports to.-> Wazuh
DNS -.reports to.-> Wazuh
Four trust boundaries, not two
flowchart LR
WAN["WAN"] -->|public application boundary| EdgeFW["Edge Firewall / public proxy"]
Browser["LAN browsers"] -->|mTLS + SSO| UserProxy["User-facing proxy"]
Service["App-to-app"] -->|IP-allowlist + SSO| InternalProxy["Internal proxy"]
Infra["LAN infra-to-infra"] -->|explicit per-flow rules| HostFW["Host firewall rules"]
Backend services trust proxy headers, not raw client IP, on every path.
Two structurally independent traffic planes
| Plane | Path |
|---|---|
| Ingress — public | Client → edge firewall/proxy → backend |
| Ingress — LAN-facing | Client → user-facing proxy (mTLS) → backend |
| East-west — app-to-app | Service → internal proxy zone → service |
| East-west — infra-to-infra | Service → firewall rule → service, direct, no proxy |
Important
Observability sits outside every request path on purpose. Logs and metrics push asynchronously to monitoring infrastructure; nothing in that pipeline is inline with application traffic, and application services don't depend on monitoring availability. If monitoring goes down, collection stops — nothing else does.
Caught by re-verification, not assumed
Warning
The last full re-check against live infrastructure found two real corrections to what was previously documented: the public reverse-proxy layer had actually moved from running as its own dedicated VM to running as a package directly on the edge firewall — and an older "flat mesh network, no mutual TLS" model for internal service traffic had been fully replaced by the two-zone split described in
docs/dns-naming.md, without the architecture documentation being updated to match at the time. Both were caught by running real commands against the live fleet, not by re-reading the previous version and assuming it still held.
What this map deliberately excludes
Not a firewall rule listing, not a port inventory, not a service configuration reference — those live in their own docs (docs/firewall-and-network.md and elsewhere). This is strictly the stable, directional shape of how trust and traffic actually move.