Architecture - CognOS

Cognitive Architecture for Intelligent Workloads

CognOS is inspired by cognitive systems. Just as cognitive systems coordinate execution (act), memory (remember), and perception (perceive), CognOS provides three first-class primitives for intelligent workloads.

The Three Pillars

Cognitive Systems

Act (Motor Control)
Remember (Memory)
Perceive (Sensory Input)

CognOS Platform

Orchestration (Workflows)
Knowledge Mesh (Entities/Claims)
Event Fabric (Streams/Triggers)

Pillar 1: Orchestration (Execution Plane)

Execute intelligent workloads under governance constraints. Every operation goes through an admission pipeline before execution.

Admission Pipeline

Request
Policy
Capability
Gate
Budget
HITL
✓ Execute

Budget Ledger

Double-entry accounting for time, tokens, and money. Lease-commit-reclaim semantics ensure you pay only for what you use.

Gate-before-Budget

Don't reserve paid resources when services are degraded. Your budget doesn't shrink because AWS had a bad day.

Deterministic Decisions

Same input always produces same verdict and reason code. Debuggable, testable, auditable.

Agent Runtime

Orleans-based supervisor/worker pattern with tool integration (MCP) and memory access.

Pillar 2: Knowledge Mesh (Memory Plane)

Structured memory for intelligent systems with provenance tracking. Transform raw inputs into entities, claims, and artifacts.

Lifecycle Management

Provisional
Reviewed
Approved

Multi-Surface Queries

Graph: Relationship traversal · Search: Full-text & semantic · Cube: Analytics & trending

Provenance Tracking

Every entity and claim tracks who, when, why, and how. Complete lineage for explainability.

Gatekeeper Admission

Quality control before ingestion: license validation, topicality filtering, PII detection.

Contradiction Detection

Flags conflicts, routes to reviewers, maintains temporal context for resolution.

Pillar 3: Event Fabric (Signal Plane)

Process streams of signals in real-time. Pipelines transform events, triggers fire actions, command streams enable reactive workflows.

Pipeline Operators

filter
transform
aggregate
join
window
pattern

Event Streams

Ordered, durable sequences with schema registration, cursor-based consumption, and replay.

Triggers & Actions

Fire workflows via command streams, send alerts, call webhooks—reactive intelligence.

Metrics as Streams

Observability data flows as first-class events. Topology views and RCA without overhead.

Bridges

Connect external systems via REST/webhooks (ingress) and SignalR/WebSockets/SSE (egress).

Built on Orleans

Orleans is Microsoft's distributed actor framework, proven at Xbox Live scale (millions of concurrent users). CognOS leverages Orleans for natural partitioning, automatic scaling, and failure isolation.

Proven Scale

Millions of concurrent users

Low single-digit millisecond latency

Grain Patterns

AgentGrain, WorkflowGrain, BudgetAccountGrain

Stateful and event-sourced grains

Streaming Built-In

Orleans Streams for pub/sub

Event Hubs and Kafka providers