> A control plane that provisions independent services into a project, and the reasoning behind that shape. # What xplatform is xplatform provisions independent services — files, auth, commerce, marketing — into a customer's project, and gives them one account, one bill and one console across all of them. The services do not talk to each other. They do not share a database. What they share is the control plane. ## Why this shape Two of these services were built separately, and both independently arrived at the same primitives: a project as the unit of isolation, an API key per project, hashed and shown once, a dashboard, a docs site, metered usage. When two systems converge on the same shape without coordination, the abstraction is real rather than speculative. Building that control plane a third and fourth time is the cost this project exists to remove. ## What a service is Not a library the platform calls into. A service is anything that satisfies the contract: - it can be **provisioned** for a project, idempotently and resumably - it **reports** what it used - it can be **suspended** and later resumed - it can be **deprovisioned**, completely Everything else about it — how files are stored, how sessions are signed, what an order costs — is that service's own business and no concern of the platform's. ## Separation, and what it buys Each service owns its database, its storage and its credentials. The control plane has its own and never queries a service's. The link between a project and a service's resources is an **address, not a join**. Nothing in the control-plane database references a service's rows by foreign key. The consequence is worth stating plainly, because it is bought deliberately and it has a price: - no cross-service query is possible - no cross-service transaction exists - an outage in one service is not an outage in another Anything that spans two services has to be composed at the edge rather than joined in a database. That is the trade, and it is the right one for services that are meant to be independently deployable. ## Where enforcement lives The platform owns entitlement — balance, plan, limits. The **tool** enforces it, synchronously, in its own request path, from a cached copy. The platform is never a hop inside a service's request. If it were, one component's latency would be everyone's latency and one component's outage would be everyone's outage.