Topology & nodes

The topology is the platform's structural skeleton — it maps the logical architecture onto physical machines. It's not a layer or a service; it's the wiring that says which components run where.

Zones — the units of the topology

A zone is a named section of the platform, like platform.cognition.data or platform.foundation.storage.kv. Components are placed into zones, and machines are assigned to zones. The topology is simply the arrangement of all the zones. (Zones are the entity; "topology" is the structure they form — managed with plasmactl zone.)

Two edges wire logical to physical

The whole mapping comes down to a few directed relationships:

flowchart LR
  N["node<br/><small>a machine</small>"] -->|allocates| Z["zone<br/><small>platform.cognition.data</small>"]
  Z -->|distributes| C["component<br/><small>application / agent</small>"]
  N -->|executes| P["platform"]

• distributes — a zone delivers a set of components (applications, agents) onto wherever it lives.
• allocates — a node serves one or more zones.
• executes — a node runs the platform instance.

Change a node's zone assignment and the components follow — no component is hard-wired to a machine.

Compute profiles

Zones carry intent about the compute they need, so each component lands on appropriate hardware:

Zone	Wants
platform.cognition.data	GPU-enabled nodes (AI/analytics)
platform.foundation.storage.kv	storage-optimized nodes
platform.interaction.observability	balanced compute nodes

Nodes

A node is a physical or virtual machine. Each node declares which zones it serves; the topology distributes the right components onto it. Nodes are the single source of truth for per-machine state (zones, network, disks) — see Nodes & topology for the operational side.

Biological analogy

Topology is the skeleton; nodes are bones with different properties (some dense for storage, some powerful for compute). The skeleton gives the organism its shape and decides where each organ sits.