0012. Deployment profiles: Solo, Lab, and Datacenter

• Status: Accepted (the SQLite store and local auth mode are built; the rest is planned, see the roadmap)
• Date: 2026-10-23
• Amends: ADR-0001, ADR-0002, ADR-0008

Amended by ADR-0015 (2026-10-24): tensora export <id> now exports one workload’s complete log. Moving up a profile uses tensora backup and tensora restore instead of the tensora export and tensora import named below. Everything else stands.

Context

Users range from a student with one MacBook to a company with racks of NVIDIA servers. The existing design is a Kubernetes datacenter stack (k3s, KubeVirt, GPU Operator, Ceph, Postgres, Keycloak). That’s far too heavy for one machine, and it can’t run natively on macOS at all.

Decision

Ship one product in three profiles. The API, CLI, and dashboard are the same everywhere, and only what’s underneath changes.

Profile	For	Machines	Store	Runs workloads with	Sign-in
Solo	One person on one machine: a laptop, a Mac, a gaming PC	1	SQLite (a file)	The node agent, in the same process	Local account
Lab	Students, classes, developers, small teams, home labs, small companies	2 to ~20 mixed Linux and Mac machines	SQLite, or Postgres	Node agents on each machine (ADR-0013)	Local accounts and invite links; OIDC optional
Datacenter	Startups at scale, enterprises, big tech	3 to thousands of servers	Postgres (HA)	Kubernetes: KubeVirt, KServe, GPU Operator (ADR-0001)	OIDC or SSO (Keycloak or the company’s IdP)

• tensora up is the Solo entry point. It runs the control plane, the agent, and the dashboard in one process, keeps its data in the user’s data directory, and listens on localhost by default.
• Store implementations: memstore (dev and tests), sqlitestore (Solo and Lab), and pgstore (Datacenter, or any Lab that wants it). All of them must pass storetest. SQLite uses a pure-Go driver, so cross-compiling stays CGO-free.
• Auth modes: local (built-in accounts and API tokens), oidc, and dev.
• The dashboard is embedded in the binary (Go embed), so a Solo install is a single file.
• Moving up a profile is an export and import (tensora export, tensora import), not a rebuild. Planned.
• A Datacenter deployment can also enroll agent machines, for example a fleet of Macs, as their own region.

Consequences

• AGENTS.md rule 1 is generalized: the store (SQLite or Postgres) owns business state, and the runtime (Kubernetes or node agents) owns runtime state.
• deploy/ and infra/ (helmfile, k3s, Ansible) are the Datacenter profile. Solo and Lab need none of it.
• New install channels: Homebrew (macOS), an install script, .deb and .rpm packages, and a container image, with launchd and systemd service units.
• SQLite allows a single writer. That’s fine for one control plane. Larger Labs, or many concurrent users, should use Postgres.

Alternatives considered

• k3s everywhere: on macOS, k3s only runs inside a Linux VM, which has no access to the Mac’s GPU.
• Docker Compose only: gives no VMs, no Mac GPU access, and no path to a datacenter.