Skip to content

Project principles

This page states what Cassian Gate decides on your behalf, what it deliberately does not, and where to read further. It is the project's authority-boundary reference — the answer to give a CI gate review, a vendor questionnaire, or a security team asking what this tool will and will not commit to.

What Cassian Gate decides

Cassian Gate is an execution-backed validation gate for network changes. Engineers declare topology, tests, and scenarios; the gate runs the declaration through a clean-state authoritative path — starting from a defined initial condition every time, executing the declared scenario, reaching explicit PASS/FAIL outcomes with auditable artifacts. The verdict is bound to the declared expectation and recorded in results.json — the project's verdict of record, which downstream automation can consume directly. The same inputs produce the same artifact; the gate is deterministic under its declared semantics. The posture is behavior-first, artifact-authoritative, CI-safe, and local-first: the gate evaluates what the network does under declared conditions, the artifact carries the verdict, and the same run produces the same artifact in CI and on a laptop.

What Cassian Gate does not decide

Cassian Gate is not a general-purpose lab platform, not a chaos engine, not a controller, not a heuristic validator, not an AI decision system, and not a feature-parity NOS platform. The gate also does not treat exploratory workflows as deployment authority — running an interactive lab session to understand a problem has value, but it isn't deployment authority. Only a recorded, artifact-backed, declared-expectation PASS is.

AI usage in the gate is advisory only. Models may suggest, summarize, or annotate; they never decide a verdict, never write a result, and never sit on the authority path between declared intent and recorded outcome. A FAIL verdict cannot be promoted to PASS by a model, a summary, or any non-authoritative tool.

For CI gate reviews, vendor questionnaires, and security teams: this tool does not make routing decisions, does not make policy decisions, does not make deployment decisions, and does not promote heuristic or AI judgments to authoritative status.

Where to read more

  • Quickstart — shortest path to a first authoritative PASS verdict from this repository.
  • Topology Schema Reference — declared shape of topologies, tests, scenarios, and invariants.
  • CLI Reference — every cassian subcommand and its exit codes.
  • CI Integration — gate-on-merge templates for GitHub Actions and GitLab CI.
  • Project README — full v2 capability list and v2.0 ship status.