Boundary Contract¶

Boundary Types¶

Severity	Meaning	Consequence
`soft`	Warning. System operating outside preferred range.	Logged. May trigger DEGRADED regime.
`hard`	Violation. System in unsafe state.	Forces CRITICAL regime immediately.

BoundaryDef¶

Defined in the binding spec boundaries list:

boundaries:
  - name: queue_depth_limit
    variable: queue_depth
    lower: null
    upper: 10000
    severity: hard
  - name: latency_warning
    variable: p99_latency_ms
    lower: null
    upper: 500
    severity: soft

Fields:

Field	Type	Description
`name`	str	Human-readable identifier
`variable`	str	Key in the values dict passed to `observe()`
`lower`	float or null	Lower bound. null = no lower check.
`upper`	float or null	Upper bound. null = no upper check.
`severity`	str	`"soft"` or `"hard"`

BoundaryObserver¶

BoundaryObserver(boundary_defs) checks a dict of measured values against all definitions.

state = observer.observe({"queue_depth": 12000, "p99_latency_ms": 300})
# state.hard_violations = ["queue_depth_limit: queue_depth=1.2e+04 outside [None, 10000]"]
# state.soft_warnings = []

BoundaryState¶

Field	Type	Content
`violations`	list[str]	All violated boundaries (soft + hard)
`soft_warnings`	list[str]	Soft-severity violations only
`hard_violations`	list[str]	Hard-severity violations only

Integration with RegimeManager¶

RegimeManager.evaluate() checks boundary_state.hard_violations first. Any hard violation forces CRITICAL regardless of R values.

Soft warnings do not directly trigger regime changes but are logged in the audit trace for post-hoc analysis.