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ELEMENT 31

RESOURCES

Guides, definitions, and direct answers on the serving system inside the appliance.

Topics

  • Serving

    5

    How Substrate serves models on the appliance: pools, routing, batching, and the latency budget.

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  • Models

    5

    Open-weight models, adapters trained on site, and what runs where on a Czar or a Grid.

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  • Platform API

    5

    One API for inference, retrieval, speech, vision, and agents, on the facility network.

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  • Integrity

    5

    The signed image, attestation, the provenance record, and what a sealed stack means.

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  • Connectivity

    5

    Air-gapped, or connected only to systems the site already secures. Nothing else.

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  • Operations

    5

    Updating, monitoring, and running the platform on a site that never phones home.

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  • Glossary

    6

    Short definitions of the terms used across the Substrate platform.

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  • Questions

    4

    Direct answers to the questions platform teams and integrators ask first.

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LATEST

Recently published.

  • Integrity

    Rolling back to the previous signed release

    A Substrate update can be undone. The previous signed release stays on the node, and a site that needs to step back applies it, attests, and resumes, with the rollback recorded like any other software load.

    · 4 min read

  • Questions

    Is Substrate sold separately from Czar?

    No. Substrate is the platform inside the Czar appliance and ships as part of the appliance subscription. There is no separate platform price, license tier, or software-only offering.

    · 3 min read

  • Integrity

    The provenance record for a node

    Every Czar node carries a provenance record covering its integration, its sealing, and every software load since. It is the node's history, kept on the appliance, written for the person who has to answer for it.

    · 4 min read

  • Questions

    Does Substrate replace our MLOps stack?

    It depends on what the stack does. Substrate replaces serving, tracing, and on-site adaptation for the facility. It does not replace a research team's training pipeline or an experiment tracker.

    · 3 min read

  • Integrity

    What Watchman watches

    Watchman is the Substrate service that keeps verifying after attestation: the signed software image and the enclosure's tamper indicators, continuously, with every deviation written to an append-only record.

    · 4 min read

  • Questions

    Can we bring our own models?

    Yes, if they are open-weight. Substrate serves open language, vision, speech, embedding, and VLA models, and a site can load the ones it already uses as signed artifacts and adapt them on its own data.

    · 3 min read

  • Integrity

    Attestation before a node takes work

    Before a Czar node joins a Grid or accepts a single request, it attests what it is running. Only a node that has proved it runs a signed release is placed on the list of nodes that may take work.

    · 4 min read

  • Questions

    Does Substrate need the internet?

    No. Every Substrate service runs on the appliance with no path out. Updates arrive as signed bundles the customer brings in, and support sessions open only when the customer opens them.

    · 3 min read

  • Integrity

    What the signed image guarantees

    Substrate runs from a sealed, signed, read-only software image. That one property is what lets a node prove what it is running, lets Watchman detect a change, and lets a site roll back with confidence.

    · 4 min read

40 articles across 8 topics.