Glossary¶
Alphabetical terms used across the Astra wiki. Authoritative definitions and API details live in the PRD (docs/PRD.md in the Astra repo).
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Access-control | Service enforcing policy, approvals, and RBAC checks (PRD §9, §18). |
| Actor | Lightweight concurrent unit with mailbox; goroutine-based in the Go implementation (PRD §6). |
| Adapter | Integration bridge between Astra and an external agent platform (e.g., D.TEC). Implements DispatchGoal, PollStatus, HandleCallback, ListCapabilities, HealthCheck. Thread-safe registry. |
| Agent | Long-lived entity users spawn; backed by agent-service and actor supervision (PRD §16). |
| Agent document | Context attached to an agent: rule, skill, context_doc, or reference. Priority-sorted and assembled into agent context for planning/execution. Stored in agent_documents table (PRD §11). |
| API gateway | Edge REST/gRPC, JWT, rate limits, WebSocket chat (PRD §9). |
| Cascade | Chain of goals linked by cascade_id; completing one goal triggers dependent goals. Used in Olympus for multi-step event response workflows. |
| Chat session | WebSocket-backed conversation between a user and a chat-capable agent. Created via REST, upgraded at /chat/ws, stores message history with streaming responses (PRD §9, §16). |
| Circuit breaker | Gateway pattern that opens after repeated downstream failures (5 in 30s), returning 503 + Retry-After. 10s half-open cooldown. Protects goal-service, agent-service, access-control (PRD §21). |
| Consumer group | Redis Streams group for competing workers claiming messages (PRD §8, §12). |
| DAG | Directed acyclic graph of tasks and dependencies (PRD §7). |
| Dead letter | Terminal task status when retries exhausted (retries >= max_retries). Optionally published to astra:dead_letter stream for alerting/repair (PRD §7, §21). |
| Dual-approval | Two-person approval rule. required_approvals count on approval_requests; individual decisions tracked in approvals JSONB array (PRD §18). |
| Episodic memory | Time-ordered experiences stored durably; search via pgvector where applicable (PRD §13). |
| Goal | User-submitted intent that the planner turns into a task graph (PRD §7, §15). |
| Hot path | Request paths that must meet sub-10ms read SLAs — cache-only reads (PRD §25). |
| Idempotency key | Client header (Idempotency-Key) on POST /goals preventing duplicate creation. Redis-backed, 24h TTL; duplicates return same goal_id (PRD §21). |
| Identity | User CRUD, login, JWT issuance (PRD §9). |
| Kernel | Microkernel: actors, tasks, scheduler, messaging, state — not full business logic (PRD §5). |
| LLM router | Model selection, caching, rate limits for inference calls (PRD §23). |
| mTLS | Mutual TLS between services (PRD §18). |
| OPA | Open Policy Agent–style policy evaluation pattern via access-control (platform rules). |
| Planner | Service that expands goals into task graphs using LLM (PRD §9). |
| Proactive posting | Astra posting to Slack without a prior user message (e.g., "Plan pending approval"). Uses POST /internal/slack/post with X-Slack-Internal-Secret auth (PRD §16). |
| Sandbox | WASM / Docker / Firecracker environment for tool execution (PRD §14). |
| Scheduler | Owns shards, ready-task detection, XADD to Redis task streams (PRD §8). |
| Semantic memory | Embedding-backed retrieval over stored knowledge (PRD §13). |
| Shard | Partition of scheduling / stream traffic for horizontal scale (PRD §8). |
| Shard ownership | Task streams partitioned by hash(agent_id) % TASK_SHARD_COUNT. Configurable count; consistent hashing for rebalancing; workers consume all shards (PRD §8). |
| Task | Unit of work in the graph; states include pending, queued, running, completed, failed, dead_letter (PRD §7). |
| Task service | CRUD and dependency API for tasks and graphs (PRD §9). |
| Trust score | Numeric reliability score on agents (agents.trust_score). Used for policy gating, e.g., requiring approval below a threshold (PRD §26). |
| Vault | Runtime secret injection; no secrets in code or logs (PRD §18). |
| Webhook ingest | Service accepting external events via POST /webhooks/{source_id} with HMAC-SHA256 validation. Publishes normalized events to Redis streams (PRD §26). |
| Worker | Process that claims tasks from streams (execution-worker, browser-worker, etc.) (PRD §9). |
| Working memory | Short-lived actor/agent state in Redis (PRD §13). |