System Kernel

Responsibilities

• Define isolation boundaries and capability bootstrapping primitives.
• Provide scheduling/runtime contracts used by higher layers (timeouts, quotas, retries).
• Make failure behavior explicit (crash containment, restart policy, safe degradation).

Key interfaces

• Capability model (what can run, where, and with which privileges).
• Resource policy (CPU/memory budgets, limits, admission controls).
• Bootstrapping contracts (secure defaults, config loading, health reporting).

Operational signals

These are the measurements that tell you whether this layer is healthy in production.

• Cold start and restart latency distributions (p50/p95/p99).
• Crash-loop rate, OOM kills, and throttling events.
• Kernel/runtime error budget burn (if applicable) and saturation indicators.

Failure modes

• Resource exhaustion (memory pressure, file descriptor limits, CPU starvation).
• Privilege boundary breaks (misconfigured policies, overly broad capabilities).
• Unsafe startup ordering leading to cascading failures.

Production readiness checklist

• Enforce least privilege and explicit capability grants.
• Implement health probes and backoff to prevent thundering herds.
• Document recovery steps and safe-mode behavior for critical services.