RFC-0005: Reference Deployment Patterns

RFC: RFC-0005
Status: Draft
Version: 0.1.0
Created: 2026-03-07
Updated: 2026-03-08
Author: Kenneth Tannenbaum, AEGIS Operations LLC
Repository: aegis-governance
Target milestone: Q2 2026
Supersedes: None
Superseded by: None

Summary

This RFC establishes the Reference Deployment Patterns (RDP) framework for AEGIS™. It defines how the AEGIS governance architecture may be deployed across heterogeneous infrastructure environments while preserving constitutional integrity and protocol compliance. AEGIS™ is deployment-environment agnostic: the Constitution and AGP-1 define what governance must do; this RFC defines how that governance may be instantiated.

Motivation

As AEGIS™ adoption grows, practitioners will ask: how do I actually run this? The answer must not be prescriptive. An architecture that requires Kubernetes to operate is not a governance standard — it is a Kubernetes plugin. At the same time, AEGIS™ cannot remain purely abstract. This RFC establishes a tiered set of Reference Deployment Patterns: concrete enough to be actionable, abstract enough to be universal.

Guide-Level Explanation

AEGIS separates two concerns: what governance does (defined by the Constitution and RFCs) and where governance runs (defined by the deployment environment). A factory’s safety inspector performs the same role whether the factory uses conveyor belts or robotic arms. The inspection procedure does not change with the machinery.

RDP-03 (Embedded Lightweight) is the starting point for most practitioners. RDP-01 (Kubernetes) is the enterprise path. RDP-02 and RDP-04 address service mesh and serverless environments respectively.

Reference-Level Explanation

Core Principle

The Capability Registry, Governance Gateway, Authority Verification, and Decision Integrity components must function correctly regardless of underlying infrastructure.

RDP-01: Kubernetes Enterprise Pattern

Status: Experimental | Branch: experimental/k8s-reference-deployment

RDP-02: Sidecar / Service Mesh Pattern

Status: Proposed

RDP-03: Embedded Lightweight Pattern

Status: Proposed | Reference: aegis-runtime repository

RDP-04: Serverless Gateway Pattern

Status: Proposed

Supply Chain Security Gap

None of the four RDPs currently address supply chain integrity for the AI model itself. Before a model operates in an AEGIS-governed environment, the deployment should verify model artifact hash, registry of model version, and provenance chain. Flagged for a future RFC. Reference: JFrog AI Catalog.

Branch Strategy

Drawbacks

• Four patterns increase documentation and maintenance surface area.
• RDP-01 is marked experimental and may diverge from the specification as the Kubernetes ecosystem evolves.
• No conformance test suite currently exists to validate that a deployment pattern satisfies constitutional requirements. Compliance is currently self-certified.

Alternatives Considered

Single prescribed deployment pattern: Simpler to document but excludes the majority of practitioners who do not operate Kubernetes. Conflicts with the deployment-agnostic principle.

No reference patterns, specification only: Maintains purity but creates an adoption barrier. Practitioners need working examples, not just specifications.

Community-contributed patterns only: Appropriate long-term but requires a stable core set first. The four patterns in this RFC represent the most common real-world deployment environments.

Compatibility

No breaking changes to RFC-0001 through RFC-0004. Deployment patterns are additive. An existing AEGIS specification deployment is unaffected by this RFC.

Implementation Notes

RDP-03 is the recommended starting point for new implementations. RDP-01 is the recommended path for enterprise Kubernetes environments and is the subject of ongoing experimental work. Derrick Sutherland’s article (Shadow-Soft, March 2026) provides independent validation of the Kubernetes control plane approach.

Open Questions

• Should RDP-01 be promoted from experimental to draft once a working reference exists?
• Should supply chain security be addressed in this RFC or a dedicated RFC?
• Should AEGIS define a conformance test suite that validates any deployment pattern against constitutional requirements?

Success Criteria

• A practitioner can deploy a compliant AEGIS runtime using any of the four patterns without modifying the core specification
• RDP-03 can be stood up in a development environment in under 30 minutes
• Each pattern maps all four AEGIS governance components to concrete implementations

References

AEGIS™ | “Capability without constraint is not intelligence”™
AEGIS Initiative — AEGIS Operations LLC