Features
CognOS provides production-ready features for intelligent workloads, organized by the Three Pillars architecture.
Pillar 1: Orchestration & Governance
Admission Pipeline
Five guards evaluate every request: Policy → Capability → Gate → Budget → HumanCheckpoint. Deterministic decisions ensure same input produces same verdict.
Budget Ledger
Double-entry accounting tracks time, tokens, and money. Lease-commit-reclaim semantics with audit trails for compliance.
Gate-before-Budget
Don't reserve paid resources when services are degraded. Circuit breaker pattern prevents wasting budget on doomed operations.
Agent Runtime
Orleans-based supervisor/worker pattern. Tool integration via providers or MCP. Memory access to Knowledge Mesh.
HITL Gates
Human-in-the-loop checkpoints for critical decisions. Queues for review, automatic proceed for routine operations.
Deterministic Decisions
Precedence rules (Deny > Defer > Delay > Allow) ensure consistent, auditable, debuggable governance.
Pillar 2: Knowledge Mesh
Entity & Claim Extraction
Transform raw inputs into structured knowledge. Entities with identity, claims with confidence and provenance.
Provenance Tracking
Every piece of knowledge tracks who, when, why, and how. Complete lineage for explainability and trust.
Lifecycle Management
Quality-controlled flow: Provisional → Reviewed → Approved. Reviewer SLAs ensure timely processing.
Multi-Surface Queries
Graph (Gremlin), Search (Azure AI), Cube (OLAP). Same knowledge, three lenses for different use cases.
Gatekeeper Admission
Quality control before ingestion: license validation, topicality filtering, PII detection, quality thresholds.
Contradiction Detection
Flag conflicts, present to reviewers, maintain both claims with temporal context for resolution.
Pillar 3: Event Fabric
Event Streams
Ordered, durable sequences with schema registration. Cursor-based consumption, replay, partitioning for scale.
Pipeline Operators
Composable transformations: filter, transform, aggregate, join, window, pattern matching. Build complex logic declaratively.
Triggers & Actions
Fire workflows via command streams, send alerts, call webhooks. Event-driven execution across the platform.
Command Streams
Special streams that Orchestration listens to for workflow starts. Enables fully reactive architecture.
Metrics as Streams
Observability data flows as first-class events. Topology views and RCA without per-event tracing overhead.
Bridges
Connect external systems via REST/webhooks (ingress), SignalR/WebSockets/SSE (egress), Kafka/Event Hubs.
Foundation & Platform
Orleans Framework
Proven at Xbox Live scale. Natural partitioning, automatic scaling, failure isolation, low latency.
Module System
Extend without forking. Hot-load custom guards, operators, extractors. Community extensions welcome.
Multi-Protocol APIs
REST, GraphQL (HotChocolate), gRPC, SignalR. Use CognOS from any language or client.
PEP/PDP Governance
Policy Enforcement Points throughout. Centralized Policy Decision Point for consistency.
Tenant Isolation
Multi-tenancy first-class. State partitioned by tenant, cross-tenant access requires explicit authorization.
Compliance Ready
Audit trails automatic. Data masking built-in. Retention policies configurable. Provenance complete.
Explore the Architecture
Learn how these features work together in the Three Pillars architecture.