The whole system
What are the pieces, and which one is in charge of what?
The one split everything else follows: a cloud service that decides what to publish, and a program beside your phones that decides how.
Drag to pan, scroll to zoom, click an element to trace it.
Open full screenWhat to look for
- The dashed boundary marked "Customer premises — outbound HTTPS only". Everything inside it runs on your hardware.
- Media travelling from the browser straight into S3, never through the Control Plane.
- Three separate AWS services, each holding one kind of thing: users, secrets, and everything else.
Read the full explanation
Cradle is two independent systems that meet at one agreed interface. The Control Plane is the cloud service you sign into — it holds workspaces, accounts, media, posts and the queue of work. The Farm Agent is a small program that runs on a machine next to your phones. Neither can see inside the other.
The division of labour is the whole design. The Control Plane decides what to publish, when, for which account, on which device. The Farm Agent decides how — how to wake a phone, open an app, pick a video, tap publish. Because that line is drawn once and drawn clearly, you can change how phones are driven without touching the product, and change the product without redeploying anything on your premises.
Notice which way the arrow points between them. The agent dials out to the Control Plane over HTTPS; nothing ever dials in. That means no inbound port to open, no static IP to buy, no firewall exception — an agent works from an office, a warehouse or someone’s spare room without a network change.
The lower right of the diagram is the part that is still a seam rather than a finished piece. Today a simulated driver stands where a real one will go. Everything above that line — contract, scheduling, credentials, recovery, history — is finished and running.
Start here. Everyone should read this one first.