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Federation Model (via Sovra)

Principle

Configuration state is site-local. Policy templates are federated.

Policy Language

OPA/Rego (see ADR-003). Sovra uses OPA natively, so federated policy templates are authored in Rego and distributed without translation. This is the primary reason OPA was chosen over Cedar.

What federates

  • Rego policy templates (regulated workload requirements) via Sovra mTLS
  • Compliance reports (drift/audit summaries) via Sovra attestation
  • Policy attestation (cryptographic proof of policy conformance)

What stays site-local

  • Configuration state (mounts, services, sysctl values)
  • Drift events, admin sessions, commit history
  • Capability reports (only meaningful to local scheduler)
  • Shell/exec session logs
  • OPA data (role mappings, vCluster-specific policy overrides)

Federation Sync

pact-policy syncs Rego templates from Sovra on a configurable interval (default 300s). Templates are stored locally and loaded into OPA as bundles. Site-local data (role mappings, vCluster config) is pushed to OPA separately and never leaves the site.

Consistent with lattice

Lattice scheduler is site-local. Federation enables cross-site job submission. pact follows the same boundary: config is local, policy is federated.