Starform — Architecture & Design Hub

Starform is a developer PaaS — connect a Git repo, push, and it runs on managed Kubernetes with databases, object storage, env vars, observability, and usage-based billing attached. Runs on DigitalOcean — platform on DOKS, customer workloads on self-managed Talos + gVisor — kept cloud-portable by a ports/adapters design. The one principle: "Starbase decides, Shuttle applies" — everything flows through desired state.

The system at a glance. Two VPCs — a Control-plane VPC (Starbase, Stardeck, Postgres, Registry) that decides what runs, and a Regional VPC /16 per region holding the customer cluster and its off-cluster ClickHouse telemetry droplet — joined by private VPC peering (one per region; separate VPCs even at single-region MVP). Plus external SaaS. The spine: "Starbase decides, Shuttle applies" — Shuttle reconciles every 30s.

Blue = desired-state / telemetry · gray = traffic · dashed = external.

Full topology

• Overview

  What Starform is, the anatomy of a deploy, system topology, the tech stack, and scaling.

• Starbase

  The control plane — decides what runs: ports, RBAC, Starforge, billing, desired state, Var Groups.

• Shuttle

  The per-cluster agent — makes each cluster match desired state, reconciling every 30s.

• Shipyard

  The per-region machine-lifecycle agent — provisions, upgrades, and repairs the Talos fleet (post-MVP).

• Kubernetes Runtime

  Self-hosted Kubernetes — customer workloads on Talos + gVisor; the split, isolation, and networking.

• Stardeck

  The Next.js customer dashboard and Mission Control — the bird's-eye observability view.

• Networking

  The per-region VPC, traffic path (Cloudflare → LB → Envoy → pod), Gateway API, and LB lifecycle.

• Observability

  The self-contained build-and-operate guide for the telemetry pipeline — logs, metrics, runbooks.

• Reference

  The canonical-sources index, glossary, open work, and the FR / SC catalog.

New here? Start with What Starform Is · Anatomy of a Deploy · Canonical Sources.