The Status section went from a table of "Shipped" straight into three
paragraphs of caveats, with nothing in between telling a reader what
standard was being applied. Read cold, that is a project confessing. Read
with the standard stated first, it is a project that refuses to call
something done because the tests pass.
So the section now opens by saying what stage this is -- pre-1.0, no
production workload -- and what "shipped" means here: verified against
real infrastructure with a runbook recording how, including what the
verification could not reach. And it says plainly why the caveats are
long, which is that they are disclosed rather than discovered. A shorter
Status section would not mean a more finished product, only a less
careful one.
It closes with what would actually close the gap: a second IdP, a real
cluster, the Windows agent on Windows, sustained load, and somebody
else's data. None of that is research, it is time on real infrastructure
-- which makes it the list a pilot works through, and makes a 1.0 tag the
wrong next milestone to reach for.
Written because the risk of a public repo at this stage is not a
competitor reading the roadmap, it is a prospect reading unusual honesty
as immaturity. The fix for that is context, not privacy.
Splunk and Cribl are not the same competitor and the claim is not the
same claim twice. Splunk is the destination and Cairn OBS replaces it,
which is what phases 0-7 were for. Cribl is the road: routing, reduction,
enrichment, redaction and replay on the way to wherever data is going.
Cairn OBS is already a road in shape -- agent, Redpanda, ingest -- and
exposes none of a pipeline's controls. The agent cannot filter, drop,
sample, mask or re-route anything; ingest normalises a schema and writes
it; there is exactly one destination and it is us.
Reconciling the two turns up something a cost-led project has to face
rather than paper over: most people buy Cribl because Splunk is expensive
per gigabyte, so being genuinely cheap per gigabyte removes the main
reason to buy Cribl in front of us. That makes the strongest pitch "one
system where there were two" rather than "we are also a pipeline vendor"
-- but that pitch only survives a buyer if we also do the four things
people buy a pipeline for that are not about spend: routing to several
destinations, redacting before data leaves the network, archive and
replay, and not being locked to one analytics vendor. Those are about
control, which is better ground anyway: cost advantages get matched and
architectural ones do not.
The consequence is uncomfortable and is written down as a decision rather
than left to be discovered: competing with Cribl means being able to send
data to S3, Splunk HEC, Elastic, OTLP and Kafka -- building features whose
purpose is to help data leave this platform. A project that refuses
lock-in in its licence and then builds it into its egress would be lying
about itself.
Four phases follow, ordered so each pays for itself: processing (8),
routing (9), archive and replay (10), fleet (11). Processing without
routing still shrinks what is stored; routing without processing forwards
everything and helps nobody.
One design decision is called out now because it collides with a
non-negotiable constraint. Cribl's rule language is JavaScript, and
embedding a JS engine in a statically-linked musl agent would end "no
glibc runtime deps" as a claim. The recommendation is a declarative rule
DSL -- matchers and typed actions, no arbitrary code -- deliberately less
expressive, small enough to audit and safe to push to ten thousand hosts.
The retention/TTL question in architecture.md is no longer deferrable and
now says so: Phase 10 asks it from the other side.
The status file and the README both still said Phase 4 was not shipped
because the environment had lost Docker and database access partway
through, and that only the audit-logging guarantees had been confirmed
against a live database. That stopped being true some time ago.
phase-4-runbook.md records the opposite in detail: Docker access came
back, a real docker-compose stack ran with real ClickHouse and Postgres
and two provisioned tenants, a local kind cluster ran the Helm chart end
to end, and both SSO protocols were verified against a real Auth0 tenant
with full browser round trips. Eight real bugs came out of that, six from
compose and two from the chart's first real install -- none of them
findable without the infrastructure.
PROJECT-SPEC.md sends readers to status.md and tells them to read it
before assuming a capability works end to end, so the one file that is
meant to be authoritative was the one understating the project by the
widest margin.
Correcting it matters more now than it would have last week, because the
evidence cannot be regenerated: proto.cairnobs.org and the VPS under it
were retired on 2026-09-04, taking the mTLS CA, the server certificate
and six enrolled agents with them. The runbooks are what is left.
Three gaps are now stated rather than implied:
The prototype is gone, so none of this can be re-run today without
building one. The DNS was kept for that; the certificates deliberately
were not.
demo.cairnobs.org is live and is not evidence for Phase 4. It runs
COMPOSE_PROFILES=single-tenant, so it exercises the OSS path and says
nothing about RBAC, tenant isolation or per-tenant ClickHouse. A healthy
demo proving multi-tenancy is exactly the wrong inference to leave
available.
SSO has been tried against one IdP and one local kind cluster, not two
IdPs and not a production-grade cluster.
The Terraform entry now names its cause instead of pointing at another
file: alerting exposes no PUT for rules or targets, and neither
rulestore.Store nor notifystore.Store has an Update method to wire one
to, so Terraform destroys and recreates -- which resets alert_state and
delivery-log continuity.
Unlike the other four projects, cairnobs had no copyright statement to change.
The Licensing section named the licence and pointed at LICENSE, but never said
who holds the copyright, and there were no SPDX headers in the source either.
That is a gap rather than a style choice: an AGPL project with no stated holder
leaves the question open, and the licence's obligations are written around
there being one. So this ADDS a line rather than replacing one.
The two LINUXexpert-org references here are github.com issue and discussion
links in CONTRIBUTING.md -- the repository's real path, unchanged.
LICENSE untouched. Its only copyright is the FSF's on the AGPL text.
The horizontal logo already carries the wordmark, so "# Cairn OBS"
directly beneath it repeated the same words twice in the first inch of
the page. Removed, and the tagline and licence line centred under the
logo so the header reads as one block.
The bold and the link are written as <strong>/<a> rather than markdown:
GitHub does not process markdown inside a raw HTML block, so **...** and
[...](...) would have rendered as literal asterisks and brackets.
Nothing linked to the removed heading, and the #licensing anchor it
referenced comes from `## Licensing`, which is untouched.
Uses the brand assets already in the repo rather than adding a copy --
web/src/lib/assets/logo-horizontal-{light,dark}.svg are the same files
NavSidebar renders, so the README cannot drift from the app's logo.
Wrapped in <picture> with a prefers-color-scheme source, since the two
variants differ by the colour they are drawn *for*, not by name: -light
carries #111315 text for light backgrounds, -dark carries #F2F2F2 for
dark ones. A single file would have been near-invisible on one of
GitHub's two themes. Both have transparent backgrounds -- the only
<rect> in each is a small design element, not a fill -- so neither
variant shows a card behind it.
CLAUDE.md was doing two jobs: durable repo conventions, and a ~500-line
phase-by-phase status narrative that duplicates the per-phase runbooks
and goes stale the moment a phase ships.
Keep mission, constraints, pinned stack, conventions, and "when in doubt"
in CLAUDE.md (572 -> 78 lines). Move the phase record verbatim to
docs/status.md, prefaced with a summary table and the known verification
gaps. Content is byte-identical; nothing was reworded or dropped.
Link both directions, and point the README's status section at the new
file.
Overview, architecture, layout, local-dev quickstart, and phase status
for Cairn OBS. Records the Phase 4 verification gap and the unverified
Windows agent path rather than presenting them as shipped.
jcoffey-dev
Coffey Labs