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Advanced Disciplines

Supply Chain Integrity and the Lineage of Artifacts

Your cluster runs what your pipeline produces. If lineage is unclear, you cannot prove what you deployed.

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Authored as doctrine; evaluated as operations.

Doctrine

Supply chain integrity is the ability to trace a running workload back to its source, build process, and review history.

Kubblai doctrine: lineage is governance. Mutable artifacts are institutional negligence.

Immutable references

Use digests for production where feasible. If you must use tags, enforce immutability policies at the registry level.

A tag that can be overwritten is a security and incident response hazard.

Signing and provenance (tradeoffs)

Signing and provenance increase trust, but they also introduce operational requirements: key management, rotation, policy enforcement, and tooling compatibility.

Implement them as a program, not as a checkbox.

Operational reality

When incidents happen, you need to know exactly what code is running. ‘Probably’ is not good enough at principal scale.

Lineage is the difference between diagnosis and speculation.