# Nova — The Autonomous Cloud Delivery Platform: Autonomy Defensibility Brief

> Strategic direction, leadership metrics & unified story
> Last refined: v1.21 — reframe from "no-humans" to "autonomous operations"

## The thesis

Nova is the autonomous infrastructure layer that lets product teams
ship without engaging an operator, and lets executives trust the
platform not because it never fails but because every decision is
captured, scored, and accountable.

**Autonomy in operations; human at stage gates.** Normal operations —
provisioning, healing, remediation — run without an operator in the
loop. Human attestation remains required at stage gates: QA signs off
for production, SRE greenlights based on operational readiness. The
absence of an operator in the loop is never the absence of a record.

## Grounded proof (measurable today)

| Proof | Source | Status |
|-------|--------|--------|
| Capabilities verified, none broken (live-AWS caps honestly skipped, resources torn down to zero-cost steady state) | regression report | grounded |
| Decision Ledger captures 100% of automated decisions with outcome backfill | decision ledger store | grounded |
| Attestation coverage: 100% of prod/dr promotions attested by a human | attestation gates + outbox | grounded |
| Confidence-gated policy engine (deterministic, not an LLM) — weighted inputs, band outcome | confidence signal | grounded |
| Attestation matrix with separation-of-duties on prod | attestation matrix + separation-of-duties | grounded |
| Pre-apply cost estimates (offline) | cost adapter | grounded |
| Test suite passes | test results | grounded |

## Deferred proof (measurable when blocking work lifts)

| Proof | Blocking work | Unblock requirement |
|-------|----------------|---------------------|
| Touchless resolution rate across production estates | 0 consumers today | Pilot estate activation |
| Live infrastructure health (ECS, ALB, RPS) | Live AWS torn down | Live AWS re-provisioning |
| Onboarding funnel: requested → granted | Auto-grant not built | Auto-grant implementation |
| Drift auto-reversal rate | No drift scheduler | Drift detection scheduler |
| Predictive vs reactive ratio | No emitter | ML anomaly-forecasting service |
| Tamper-evident ledger checkpoints (S3 Object Lock + JWS) | Audit ledger build-out | Audit ledger build-out |

## Anti-claims (what Nova is NOT)

1. **Nova's decisions are NOT made by an LLM.** They are made by a
   confidence-gated policy engine: deterministic scripts calculate a
   score, and a band outcome gates the action. The platform functions
   without AI. The Decision Ledger captures this real decision path —
   not a fabricated "AI agent." When an LLM planner is added, it will
   emit richer `alternatives_considered` without schema breakage.
2. **Nova does NOT remove humans from accountability.** Only from
   normal operations. Every stage-gate promotion (qa/prod/dr) requires
   a human attestation recorded with approver identity,
   separation-of-duties check, and the evidence matrix.
3. **Nova is NOT for legacy, untagged, or freeform infrastructure.** It
   requires Terraform-managed, policy-aligned, fully-tagged inputs.
4. **Nova does NOT fabricate metrics.** Every metric is grounded (cites
   a source), derived (documented formula), or deferred (cites the
   blocking work). No fabricated numbers in any deck slide or metrics
   entry (the "no fabrication" hard constraint).

## What "won" looks like

By month 18, Nova is the layer enterprise leadership points to when
they say *"we don't have an infrastructure ops team anymore, and the
audit trail is stronger than it ever was"* — and it is the layer their
AI engineering teams reach for first when an agent needs to deploy.