Concrete Reference Technology Stacks & Blueprints
Tier 3: Technical Specifications · Audience: Principal Engineers, DevOps/SecOps Architects, Platform Engineers · Normative Status: Informational / Illustrative Reference
Prerequisites: System Overview & The 4-Plane Model · The Architectural Constitution
1. Bridging Normative Architecture to Production Engineering
TIDIR's core specifications are intentionally vendor-neutral. They define declarative schemas (OCSF, STIX 2.1), formal state-machine bounds ( MUST, SHOULD, MAY).
However, practicing engineers must build with concrete technologies. This document provides three reference technology blueprints mapping the 4-Plane Model to proven production platforms:
- The CNCF / Open-Source Reference Stack: Built entirely on cloud-native, open-source infrastructure.
- The AWS Cloud-Native Reference Stack: Built on managed Amazon Web Services primitives.
- The Microsoft / Azure Hybrid Reference Stack: Built on Microsoft 365, Azure, and Fabric infrastructure.
2. The CNCF / Open-Source Reference Stack
The open-source stack delivers strict on-premises data boundary enforcement via sovereign clusters, zero proprietary licensing fees, and full compliance with Invariant 11 (Operational Portability).
Component Mapping: CNCF / Open-Source Stack
| TIDIR Architectural Layer | Logical Role | Open-Source / CNCF Reference Technology | Operational Rationale |
|---|---|---|---|
| Layer 1: Ingress | Kernel & Host Instrumentation | Cilium Tetragon / Falco | High-performance eBPF kernel event filtering with minimal CPU overhead. |
| Layer 1: Edge Forwarding | Buffer & Stream Routing | Vector (Datadog open-source) | Memory-safe Rust forwarder capable of high-throughput parsing and VRL transforms. |
| Layer 2: Streaming Bus | Distributed Event Log | Redpanda / Apache Kafka | Low-latency, partition-scalable streaming with Raft consensus. |
| Layer 2: Lakehouse | Decoupled Columnar Storage | Apache Iceberg on MinIO/Ceph | Open table format supporting partition evolution, time-travel, and zero-copy queries. |
| Layer 2: Hot Index | Fast Aggregation & Streaming Queries | ClickHouse | Sub-second analytical queries across billions of security events; vectorized execution. |
| Layer 3: Detection Engine | Polyglot DaC Execution | Polyglot DaC (ClickHouse SQL + Falco) | Versioned in Git; native target optimization without translation performance penalty. |
| Layer 3: Risk Scoring | Multi-Signal Evidence Compounding | Rust / Python Microservice | Implements the Bayesian Multi-Signal Risk Lens (ADR-0009). |
| Layer 4: Analytical Mesh | Advisory Investigation Agents | Local SLMs (Qwen/Llama) via vLLM | Self-hosted inference eliminating cloud data leakage, running strictly read-only. |
| Layer 4: Defence Control Plane | Policy Enforcement & Authorization | Open Policy Agent (OPA) / Gatekeeper | Declarative Rego policies validating blast-radius limits and Tier 0 immunity. |
| Layer 4: Workload Identity | Machine Attestation & SVIDs | SPIFFE / SPIRE | Cryptographic task-scoped X.509 certificates with TTL |
| Layer 4: Actuation Plane | Fail-Secure Containment | Temporal.io | Distributed state machine enforcing monotonic saga execution and forward escalation. |
3. The AWS Cloud-Native Reference Stack
The AWS stack maximizes managed service scalability, native security finding aggregation, and serverless compute efficiency.
Component Mapping: AWS Cloud-Native Stack
| TIDIR Architectural Layer | Logical Role | AWS Cloud-Native Technology | Operational Rationale |
|---|---|---|---|
| Layer 1: Ingress | Native Security Finding Federation | AWS Security Hub / GuardDuty | Normalizes AWS-native findings directly into OCSF Class 2001/2004 structures. |
| Layer 1: Ingestion Stream | Line-Rate Telemetry Ingress | Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose | Serverless streaming with dynamic partitioning directly into columnar formats. |
| Layer 2: Lakehouse | Decoupled Columnar Object Storage | Amazon S3 (Apache Iceberg tables) | High-durability object storage with S3 Object Lock for WORM compliance (INV-01). |
| Layer 2: Hot Index | Real-Time Triage & Full-Text Search | Amazon OpenSearch Service | Low-latency querying for active 14-day alert investigations and tabular dashboards. |
| Layer 3: Detection Engine | Scheduled Lakehouse Batch DaC | Amazon Athena (Presto/Trino) | Partition-pruned SQL sweeps executing historical anomaly detection across Iceberg tables. |
| Layer 4: Analytical Mesh | Advisory Triage Agents | Amazon Bedrock (Claude / Llama 3) | Enterprise VPC-isolated inference endpoints operating behind the Agent Trust Boundary. |
| Layer 4: Control Plane | Policy Kernel & Blast-Radius Gate | AWS Verified Permissions (Cedar) | Millisecond-latency authorization assertions evaluating Tier 0 asset immunity. |
| Layer 4: Ephemeral Identity | Workload Attestation | AWS IAM Roles Anywhere / SPIRE | Issues temporary session credentials constrained to task boundaries. |
| Layer 4: Actuation Plane | Fail-Secure Monotonic Containment | AWS Step Functions | Declarative state machine orchestration guaranteeing forward escalation upon step failure. |
4. The Microsoft / Azure Hybrid Reference Stack
The Microsoft / Azure stack aligns with enterprise Microsoft 365, Entra ID, and Azure Data Explorer deployments.
Component Mapping: Microsoft / Azure Hybrid Stack
| TIDIR Architectural Layer | Logical Role | Microsoft / Azure Reference Technology | Operational Rationale |
|---|---|---|---|
| Layer 1: Ingress | Domain Security Findings | Microsoft Defender XDR | Emits high-fidelity native endpoint, identity, and cloud findings into Event Hubs. |
| Layer 1: Ingestion Stream | Enterprise Event Bus | Azure Event Hubs (Kafka protocol) | High-throughput streaming bus with native geo-redundancy. |
| Layer 2: Lakehouse | Decoupled Enterprise Lakehouse | Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 (ADLS) | Scalable object storage structured via Delta Lake / Apache Iceberg formats. |
| Layer 2: Hot Index | Real-Time Log & Anomaly Engine | Azure Data Explorer (ADX) / Sentinel | Extremely fast KQL execution across billions of events with native hot caching. |
| Layer 3: Detection Engine | Detection-as-Code via GitOps | Sentinel KQL Repositories (GitHub/Azure DevOps) | Polyglot DaC rules authored in KQL, validated in automated PR workflows. |
| Layer 4: Analytical Mesh | Advisory Investigation Assistants | Azure OpenAI Service (GPT-4o) | Private Link enterprise model deployment with zero data retention for training. |
| Layer 4: Control Plane | Policy Kernel & Governance | Azure Policy / OPA on AKS | Deterministic authorization blocking disruptive actions on mission-critical resource groups. |
| Layer 4: Ephemeral Identity | Workload Identity Attestation | Microsoft Entra Workload ID / SPIRE | Federated token issuance without static client secrets. |
| Layer 4: Actuation Plane | Monotonic Containment Workflows | Azure Logic Apps (Standard) | Orchestrates containment steps with mandatory approval cards and forward compensation. |
5. Architectural Invariant Compliance Across Reference Stacks
Regardless of the technology stack selected, every production implementation MUST enforce the 11 constitutional invariants:
- Telemetry Preservation (
INV-01): All three stacks store raw telemetry in open columnar formats (Parquet/Iceberg) withunmapped_datapreserved, preventing vendor lock-in. - Authority Separation (
INV-04): In every stack, AI inference engines (vLLM, Bedrock, Azure OpenAI) operate in a read-only capacity behind the Agent Trust Boundary without direct mutation keys. - Reachability Monotonicity (
INV-07): All three orchestration engines (Temporal, Step Functions, Logic Apps) execute containment as forward-compensating state machines where partial errors escalate outwards rather than rolling back security barriers. - Human Recoverability (
INV-09): All three implementations retain independent, out-of-band manual flight decks and cryptographic master Emergency Stops (E-Stops).