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Explanation

Explanation is understanding-oriented. It is the discursive quadrant: it steps back from the keyboard and discusses why plexsphere is built the way it is — the trade-offs taken, the alternatives rejected, the invariants that shape the model. You read it to deepen and consolidate knowledge, not to get a task done.

Explanation does not teach a beginner (that is a tutorial), does not walk you through a job (that is a how-to guide), and does not state a bare contract (that is reference). When those quadrants say what and how, this one says why.

The explanation quadrant has two families.

System architecture

How the platform fits together above any single bounded context — the control-plane / data-plane split, the trust model, and where state lives.

  • Architecture — the entry point: the two-binary topology, the shared platform packages, the storage topology, and the dashboard's place in the whole.

Read it when you are planning a change that crosses a context boundary, onboarding and need one map of the system, or debugging an integration and need to confirm which process owns which state.

Bounded contexts

The domain-driven core: each context's ubiquitous language, aggregates, invariants, state machines, and the seams it exposes to other contexts.

  • Bounded contexts — the entry point: identity, mesh, audit, signing, labels, and provisioning, each with its own page set mirroring internal/<context>/.

Read it before you change code inside a context, when reviewing a cross-context change, or when you need the canonical event-envelope shape for a flow.

About this documentation

  • How this documentation is organised — why the docs are split into tutorials, how-to guides, reference, and explanation, and how to tell which quadrant a page belongs in. Read this before you add or move a page.

When to read this section

  • You keep being surprised by the system and want the model behind it.
  • You are reviewing a design and need the rationale, not the recipe.
  • You are about to write a doc and need to know which quadrant it is.