# Nova — The Autonomous Cloud Delivery Platform

Speaker notes: Do not frame this as "humans are the problem." The problem is that ownership was granted without the discipline, tooling, and lifecycle planning that infrastructure requires. The operator is not the bottleneck because operators exist — the bottleneck is that operations depend on a few individuals instead of an encoded system.

Transition: Here is the destination Nova is building toward.

Talking points: Open with the shift: "you build it, you run it" put Terraform into product teams — ownership without discipline is destroying value; Land the lifecycle-planning gap: resources authored for creation, not for patching/rollback → destructive changes; Land the urgency: AI-era 0-day pace demands proactive scanning as code + at runtime, remediated at threat pace; Call out tribal knowledge / the rockstar-operator problem — the platform should encode the discipline, not the person; Do NOT frame this as "humans are the problem" — the problem is ownership without the discipline and tooling; Key takeaway: the problem is infrastructure ownership without discipline; the answer is an autonomous platform that encodes the discipline

Speaker notes: "Visible" is the operative word. The vision is not just that operations run without an operator — it is that operations become observable, queryable, and accountable. That is what makes the trust defensible.

Transition: The vision is ambitious — here are the strategic objectives that make it concrete, and the anti-goals that keep it focused.

Talking points: Read the vision verbatim — "infrastructure operations become visible" is the operative phrase; Emphasize "provable, not promised" — trust established by deterministic scripts; the platform functions without AI; State the attestation model up front: QA for production, SRE for operational readiness; Key takeaway: autonomous operations with provable trust — security, remediation velocity, reliability, lead time made visible, not promised

Speaker notes: Objective #2 is the one to land carefully: trust is established by deterministic scoring, not by an LLM. The platform functions without AI.

Transition: The objectives are concrete — here is what Nova is NOT, to keep it focused.

Talking points: Objective #1: zero-touch operations — autonomy as the default, not the demo; stage-gate attestation (QA, SRE) remains human by design; Objective #2 is the one to land carefully: trust = deterministic scoring, not an LLM; the platform functions without AI; Objective #3: four CTO-grade metrics (Lead Time, Vuln Count, MTTR, Spend) — all flow into PowerBI; Objective #4 is the integration thesis: Nova integrates with any upstream source; provides skills + MCP; all prod intents go through the same controls; Key takeaway: the scope is explicit — Nova governs infra + delivery, integrates with any source through one contract, measures success on four CTO metrics

Speaker notes: Anti-goals #3 and #4 protect the scope boundary — Nova will not become an IDE or a product-planning tool.

Transition: The scope boundary is explicit — here is exactly where Nova sits relative to the product development lifecycle.

Talking points: Not a general-purpose AI agent platform; Not a system that removes humans from accountability — only from normal operations; Not an upstream development platform (no product backlogs, IDE, code authorship); Not a replacement for the Product Development Lifecycle (PDLC); Anti-goals #3 and #4 protect the scope boundary — Nova will not become an IDE or a product-planning tool; Key takeaway: the boundaries are explicit — Nova is purpose-built for infra ops + delivery, not a general-purpose AI agent or an upstream dev platform

Speaker notes: This slide protects the scope. The moment Nova starts owning the PDLC, it loses focus. The contract boundary is what keeps Nova deep on infrastructure and delivery rather than shallow on everything.

Transition: With the scope clear, here is who owns what across the delivery lifecycle.

Talking points: Nova governs infra + delivery only; the PDLC (backlog, code authorship, IDE) is upstream — Nova stays downstream of it; Integration is only through the validated contract boundary; Any upstream source (AI agent, agentic SDLC, dev platform) produces submissions subject to the same compliance standards; Nova validates the submission, not the author; Key takeaway: Nova is purpose-built for infrastructure operations; the scope boundary is clean and bounded

Speaker notes: Quality attestation is now owned by Quality Engineering (not the Platform), and Production readiness is owned by SRE. The Platform runs the checks agentically but is never the Accountable party for the gate — that separation keeps the platform honest.

Transition: With ownership clear, here is how the pipeline enforces it.

Talking points: Four roles now: Citizen Developer, Platform, Quality Engineering, SRE; Quality attestation is owned by Quality Engineering (not the Platform); Production readiness is owned by SRE; The Platform runs the checks agentically but is never the Accountable party for the gate — that separation keeps the platform honest; Production readiness is co-owned: the platform runs attestations; the citizen developer authorizes the promotion at the stage gate; Key takeaway: you bring FRs + UAT; Nova provides NFRs + infra; QE guards the gate evidence; SRE signs off on production readiness

Speaker notes: The two-stage scan is the key design: static code scanning catches policy violations before the cost of a plan; runtime plan scanning catches what the static code cannot (resolved values, cross-resource issues). The platform picks the runtime scanner based on configuration — never both, to avoid duplicate noise.

Transition: The pipeline produces decisions — here is how every decision is captured and made accountable.

Talking points: Walk the pipeline left-to-right: contract → resolver → adapter → Checkov (static) → plan → Wiz (on plan) → confidence → gate → apply; Two-stage scan: Checkov on static code BEFORE the plan (fail-fast dev feedback); Wiz on the plan (or Checkov as drop-in if no Wiz creds); Never both Wiz + Checkov on the plan — avoid duplicate noise; Dev is autonomous; qa/prod/dr require attestation (QA for quality, SRE for production readiness); Key takeaway: two layers of scanning, zero operator involvement in normal operations

Speaker notes: Do not dwell on the storage substrate. The audience cares that the ledger is append-only, queryable, and tied to outcomes — not that it is a hash-chain in a SQLite file. The D-122 honesty point is restated without the decision ID: the platform's decisions are deterministic; the ledger captures that real path.

Transition: Decisions are captured — here is how stage-gate attestation keeps humans in accountability.

Talking points: "AI decisions" are really automated decisions — deterministic scripts calculate a score; the platform functions without AI; Do not dwell on the storage substrate — the value is accountability (immutable, queryable, traceable to outcome), not the database; Every stage-gate attestation is captured with approver identity and the evidence presented; When an LLM planner is added later, it emits richer alternatives without breaking the schema; Key takeaway: autonomous is defensible because every decision is immutable, queryable, accountable — and "automated" means deterministic scoring, not a black-box LLM

Speaker notes: The matrix is not a rubber stamp. Each concern has a freshness window and a plain-language description of what is being attested. The "operator-supplied" label from the prior deck was dropped — every concern now has a plain-language description.

Transition: QA is half the matrix — here are the production and DR controls.

Talking points: The matrix is not a rubber stamp — structured, freshness-validated; Each concern now has a plain-language description of what is being attested (the old "operator-supplied" label is gone); Three QA concerns: functional correctness (24h), performance baseline (7d), security posture (24h); Each concern has a freshness window — evidence older than the window does not satisfy the gate; Key takeaway: QA signs off on quality before any promotion — the gate is explicit, not implicit

Speaker notes: The prod/DR rows are the operational-readiness and resilience gates — SRE signs off on operability, incident response, capacity, and the three resilience checks (DR drill, chaos, backup). Separation-of-duties on prod is the rule that keeps the gate honest: the approver cannot be the same person who built the deployment.

Transition: You've seen how Nova works — the pipeline, the ledger, the attestation gates. Here is how Nova instruments itself so that every claim in this deck is traceable to a real signal.

Talking points: Seven prod/DR concerns: operational readiness, incident response, capacity & cost, DR drill, chaos, backup, DR region deploy; SRE signs off on operability (runbooks, dashboards, on-call), incident response, capacity, and the three resilience checks; Each concern has a freshness window — 30d/90d/180d depending on the control; SoD on prod: the approver can't be the same person who built it — the rule that keeps the gate honest; Key takeaway: autonomy in operations, human in accountability, by design — the matrix is what makes autonomous operations safe enough to trust in production

Speaker notes: The value is not the plumbing — it is that the platform's metrics surface in a tool leadership already uses (PowerBI), and every number is traceable. The live-ops dashboard is where the "infrastructure operations become visible" theme lands concretely.

Transition: The architecture is sound — here is the measured proof.

Talking points: Deliberately minimal: Nova-native CloudEvents; no Kafka/Prometheus/ClickHouse; The live-ops dashboard is built in PowerBI on top of the exported views — leadership sees the same numbers the platform produces; Every number in the Proof slides is traceable to a signal — "where does this number come from?" → a query against the cold store; This is where the "infrastructure operations become visible" theme lands concretely; Key takeaway: the architecture is the trust substrate — operations become visible in PowerBI, with full traceability

Speaker notes: The mandatory-by-design point is the one to land. The ledger + attestation are not a best-effort feature; they are a gate. No change reaches production without both. That is what makes the 100% numbers credible — they are enforced, not aspirational.

Transition: Trust is provable — here is the cost side of the ROI.

Talking points: Both 100% — no automated decision is ever lost; no prod/dr promotion lands without a human sign-off; The mandatory-by-design point: the ledger entry + the human attestation are a gate, not a best-effort feature; Easily queried: by run, by environment, by approver, by outcome — the audit trail is a query, not a forensic exercise; Key takeaway: trust is provable — not a marketing claim, a queryable record; no change to production without both the ledger entry and the human attestation

Speaker notes: The formula is shown inline, not hidden. The "no fabrication" constraint in action: show the formula, show the caveat, do not pretend the production numbers exist.

Transition: The proof is grounded — here is what is honestly deferred, and why.

Talking points: The ROI formula is shown inline — not hidden in a footnote; The four CTO-grade metrics are the ROI proof — Lead Time, Vuln Count, MTTR, Cloud Spend; The N=0 caveat is stated explicitly: the formula is grounded; the production numbers activate with a pilot; Key takeaway: the ROI is not a black box — the formula is shown, the four metrics are committed, the production-denominator caveat is up front

Speaker notes: The preempt is critical: these deferrals are measurement infrastructure, not autonomy. The platform runs without an operator in the loop. What is deferred is the evidence pipeline for live-infra health, drift, predictive remediation — not the autonomy itself.

Transition: The proof is honest — here is the roadmap from here to the targets.

Talking points: The preempt is critical: these deferrals are measurement infrastructure, not autonomy — the platform IS autonomous in operations; The blocking work is named in plain language (no decision IDs) — "live AWS re-provisioning", "drift-detection scheduler", "ML service"; Showing this to leadership demonstrates honesty, not weakness; Key takeaway: the autonomy is real; the measurement gaps are documented with the work that unblocks each one

Speaker notes: This is the bridge from "honestly deferred" to "here is how we get there." The roadmap uses timeframes, not status — most of it is not implemented yet, so a status column would be noise.

Transition: The unblock path is clear — here is the 12-month product arc.

Talking points: Each deferred metric has an unblock path and a timeframe — near-term, mid-term, longer-term; No status column: most of it is not implemented yet, so status would be noise; Re-evaluation triggers: each blocking piece of work lifts on its own schedule; Key takeaway: every deferred metric has a plan and a timeframe — nothing is hand-waved

Speaker notes: The roadmap is organized by product outcome, not by technical milestone. Each quarter activates one strategic objective from the North Star.

Transition: Here is the quarter-by-quarter detail.

Talking points: This is the *product* roadmap, forward-looking only; Q1 Pilot Activation → Q2 Provable Trust → Q3 Compounding ROI → Q4 Integration & Predictive; Each quarter activates one strategic objective from the North Star; Key takeaway: the 12-month product arc — each quarter activates a strategic objective and its board-level metric

Speaker notes: Q1–Q3 are committed (grounded pipeline + known unblock paths). Q4 targets are committed-deliverable, aspirational-metric — the ML service ships, the intent-share number is a first measurement (we do not control adoption rate).

Transition: Production-grade guidance is how Nova helps the citizen developer's AI agent meet the bar — here is the first half.

Talking points: Q1: three post-pilot metrics go live (Touchless ≥99%, Escalation <0.1%, Accuracy ≥99.5%) — denominator activates with the pilot; Q2: Decision Ledger Coverage was already grounded — tamper-evidence is the Q2 upgrade (local hash-chain → Object Lock + signed checkpoints); Q3: Drift Auto-Reversal ≥95% unblocks when the drift scheduler ships; Spend Reduction ≥25% measured against the pilot baseline; Q4: Predictive:Reactive ≥3:1 requires the ML forecasting service; AI-Agent Intent Share is a first measurement (aspirational-metric); Key takeaway: each quarter has a concrete deliverable, a target metric grounded in a strategic objective, and a path from deferred to shipped

Speaker notes: This is the first half of the Atelier story — the surface (skills + MCP). The next slide is what the surface catches that deterministic scanners cannot.

Transition: Here is what that guidance catches that deterministic scanners cannot.

Talking points: Nova instructs the citizen developer's AI agent via skills (markdown, keyed to engineering domains) + an MCP server (4 tools, plugin-registry, stdio); The integration point is the same regardless of source — AI agent, agentic SDLC, traditional IDE all get the same skills + MCP; This is how Nova makes the citizen developer production-grade without owning the PDLC; Key takeaway: the citizen developer's AI agent is not unguided — Nova provides engineering principles as skills + MCP

Speaker notes: The value is the gap deterministic scanners leave: engineering discipline. Policy scanners catch "is this S3 bucket public?"; the MCP server catches "is this service observable if that bucket fails?". The vendoring point is audit reproducibility — the validation is not a black box.

Transition: You've seen the problem, the solution, and the proof. Here is the recap and the ask.

Talking points: The value is the gap deterministic scanners leave: engineering discipline (Wiz/Checkmarx/Mend check policy/secrets, not discipline); The MCP server catches "is this service observable?", "is this error path handled?", "is this API contract clear?"; Vendored at a pinned tag → audit reproducibility — a validation result is replayable months later; Key takeaway: submissions are checked for engineering discipline, not just policy compliance — and the check is reproducible for audit

Speaker notes: The ask is a business decision, not insider language. "Approve a pilot estate" is a C-suite decision. "Approve the ledger build-out" is a budget decision. The recap reinforces the 4-beat arc — the audience leaves with the structure, not a pile of facts.

Talking points: Recap the 4-beat arc so the audience leaves with the structure; The ask is a business decision: approve a pilot estate + the tamper-evident ledger build-out; "Pipeline-ready" → "production-proven" is the value proposition; Key takeaway: approve a pilot + the ledger build-out to move from pipeline-ready to production-proven

Talking points: Reference for every metric mentioned in the deck; Use if the audience asks "what does X mean?"