Skip to content

STARTUP_BRIEF.md

Latest commit

 

History

History
43 lines (30 loc) · 2.24 KB

STARTUP_BRIEF.md

File metadata and controls

43 lines (30 loc) · 2.24 KB
Raw

GONK Startup Brief

Positioning

GONK should be positioned as an edge-native API gateway for industrial, IoT, robotics, and air-gapped environments where teams need secure service exposure without running a heavy control plane.

The narrow wedge is: "single-binary zero-control-plane gateway for secure edge networks."

Ideal Customer Profile

  • Industrial automation teams connecting PLCs, sensors, HMIs, and backend services.
  • Robotics and field-device teams that deploy services on gateways with limited compute.
  • Defense, utilities, logistics, and healthcare teams with air-gapped or intermittently connected networks.
  • Platform engineers who need mTLS, JWT, API keys, rate limits, and observability near the device layer.

Why It Can Be Appealing

  • Lightweight deployment: one Go binary plus YAML.
  • Security-first story: mTLS, JWT, API keys, RBAC, scopes, and certificate-to-role mapping.
  • Edge-ready story: works without Kubernetes, cloud accounts, or centralized control planes.
  • Practical operator workflow: templates, validation, metrics, health endpoints, hot reload.

Product Gaps To Close

  • Signed release artifacts and a documented release checklist.
  • Deeper docs for air-gapped admin access and certificate lifecycle operations.
  • Hardening tests for WebSocket/gRPC proxy behavior, config reload cleanup, and long-running health checks.
  • Fleet-level status/dashboard for multi-node deployments.
  • Local or self-hosted mTLS smoke test once runtime budget allows an additional Docker Compose stack.

Commercial Roadmap

  1. Community Edition: single-node gateway, config templates, Docker image, local examples.
  2. Team Edition: dashboard, audit logs, config history, signed bundles, policy packs.
  3. Enterprise Edition: fleet management, certificate lifecycle automation, SSO, HA coordination, support contracts.

First 30-Day Milestones

  • Keep make build, make test, make demo-smoke, and make docker-build passing locally before releases.
  • Publish a tagged release manually and verify checksums.
  • Add one complete industrial IoT walkthrough with mTLS, API key fallback, JWT operators, and Prometheus.
  • Add config reload stress tests for repeated route/upstream changes.
  • Add WebSocket and gRPC smoke tests with real upstream services.