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10: Federation and Operations — Production Deployment

Phase: 4 | Tier: Maintainer
Patterns introduced: None (integration phase)
Prerequisite: Phase 3 complete (Builder tier)

Why This Matters

Running ICN in production requires understanding federation (inter-cooperative coordination) and operations (deployment, monitoring, incident response). This layer bridges development and production.

→ See manual.md § "Federation and Production" for design rationale.

What You'll Read

1. Federation Agreement Lifecycle: icn/crates/icn-federation/src/agreement/types.rs

Cooperatives form federation agreements:

pub enum AgreementState {
    Proposed,
    Negotiating,
    Active,
    Suspended,
    Terminated,
}

File: icn/crates/icn-federation/src/agreement/manager.rs

2. Clearing and Netting: icn/crates/icn-federation/src/clearing.rs

Inter-cooperative credit settlement:

  • Clearing: Offsetting mutual debts
  • Netting: Reducing to single obligation

3. Configuration Layering

Files: icn/bins/icnd/src/config.rs, icn/crates/icn-core/src/config.rs

Default → File → Environment → CLI → Runtime
(lowest priority)              (highest priority)

4. Deployment: deploy/k8s/

Production Kubernetes manifests:

  • StatefulSet for persistent storage
  • Service for peer discovery
  • ConfigMap for configuration
  • Secret for keystore passphrase

5. Monitoring: icn/crates/icn-obs/src/metrics.rs

Prometheus metrics exported at /metrics:

  • gossip_entries_total
  • ledger_validation_failures_total
  • network_connections_active

Grafana dashboards in deploy/monitoring/

What You'll Build

No new lab — integrate previous labs into a deployed system.

Checkpoint

You've completed this layer when you can:

  1. Deploy ICN: Run ICN on Kubernetes or Docker Compose
  2. Monitor health: Query Prometheus metrics, interpret dashboards
  3. Debug production: Trace a live issue using logs + metrics
  4. Explain federation: Describe clearing/netting with examples

Artifact: Deployment proof (screenshot of running pods + metrics endpoint).

Deep Reference

→ reference/module-11-federation.md — Full federation protocol
→ reference/module-09-ops-deploy.md — Deployment, monitoring, backups
→ docs/operations/deployment/HOMELAB_DEPLOYMENT.md — Live deployment example → deploy/k8s/README.md — Kubernetes deployment guide

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