Naughtian

The stack

Three tools, three layers. Decisions get written down before they are executed rather than reconstructed from a dashboard afterwards — and nothing in the foundation is allowed to take the rest of the system down with it when it fails.

Kuberina

Offline scheduling for heterogeneous Kubernetes. Reformulates pod placement as multi-dimensional bin packing, borrowed from how mega-vessel shipping lines stow containers. Produces a reviewable blueprint instead of an opaque runtime decision.

Overview · Tutorial · Paper

Helvilette

Pull-based GitOps delivery for Ansible. Agents pull playbooks from Git and reconcile at the systemd layer. One last SSH session to install it, then port 22 closes forever.

Overview · Tutorial

Kallisto

Secret delivery for the request path. A node-local cache in front of your existing Vault or OpenBao, speaking the KV-v2 API. Your request path keeps working while Vault is sealed, failing over, or mid-upgrade. Adopting it is one environment variable. So is removing it.

Overview · Tutorial

Why this exists

The previous generation of infrastructure tooling solved workload management and quietly left control-plane management as an exercise for the reader. Vault manages your secrets — who manages Vault? Consul discovers your services — who keeps its quorum healthy?

Every control plane needs a control plane. And anything that must have quorum is structurally disqualified from being the bottom of the stack, because losing a vote means the whole thing stops.

The day-2 problemThe core argument: who operates the operators, why quorum disqualifies a system from being the foundation, and what Naughtian does and does not solve.

Where each one sits

Naughtian is deliberately layered. Kuberina decides where workloads go before anything runs. Helvilette keeps the machines underneath converged on their desired state. Kallisto serves the secrets those workloads need without a round trip to the root of trust.

The stack, layer by layerHow the three tools compose, what each one deliberately does not do, and where the boundaries sit.

Research

Design decisions here are argued in public before they are implemented. The whitepapers carry the mathematics, the benchmarks, and the reasoning.

Kuberina: Maritime Stowage-Inspired Combinatorial OptimizationThe full paper — problem formulation, the three-phase FFD/GA/CSP pipeline, and results on a 186-node, 2,714-pod benchmark.

Whitepaper templateThe interview-question framework used to write every paper in this collection.

Also coming

Kalena, Kaeliir and Ginnungagap are in the works and will appear here as they become real. Names come from the same saga as the rest — see names and mythology.