Offline grace & degraded mode

A core principle of the licensing design is that a transient loss of connectivity to the Specaria platform must not take your traffic down. The product is designed to keep running normally through a bounded offline window, and to degrade gracefully — not abruptly — only after that window is exhausted.

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Two failure stances: fail open vs fail closed

The product treats two kinds of platform interaction very differently:

• Telemetry fails open. Outbound signals to the platform — the capacity heartbeat, update polls, feedback — are best-effort. If the platform returns an error or is unreachable, the product logs it and carries on. A failed heartbeat never crashes the product and never blocks traffic.
• Entitlement fails closed. Verifying that you are licensed is not best-effort. If the license cannot be validated — bad signature, expired, wrong installation, unsupported format — the product ultimately disables licensed write operations. But "ultimately" is important: it does so only after the offline grace window below, never on the first failed contact.

This is the deliberate asymmetry: we never let losing the network silently flip you into a worse-than-licensed or better-than-licensed state.

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The offline grace window

When the product cannot reach the Specaria platform to re-verify (for example, the egress path is temporarily down), it does not immediately treat the install as unlicensed. Instead it relies on its cached verification result and a bounded offline grace window.

The v1.0 design uses a 14-day offline grace window. For those 14 days of being unable to reach the platform, the product operates normally on its last good verification.

Only once the install has been unable to reach the platform for longer than the grace window does the product transition into a degraded mode.

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Degraded mode (staged)

Degraded mode is staged, not a cliff. The v1.0 design progresses through stages the longer the install stays unreachable:

1. Normal (0 to 14 days offline). Full operation on the cached verification result.
2. Read-only / degraded (after the grace window). The product enters a read-only posture:
   • new service onboarding is blocked,
   • activating new mappings is blocked,
   • accepting new discovered services is blocked,
   • while existing runtime traffic continues — your already-published conversions keep serving. The product surfaces a warning so operators can see why writes are blocked.
3. Hard stop (after a further extended period). If the install remains unreachable well beyond the read-only stage, the product reaches a hard stop. This is the last-resort stage; the staged approach is designed so that an operator has ample warning and a long runway to restore connectivity or refresh the license before reaching it.

The intent throughout is that a network blip is invisible, a sustained outage degrades to read-only with existing traffic preserved, and only a prolonged, unaddressed loss of entitlement results in a hard stop.

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What restores normal operation

Re-establishing connectivity to the platform (so the product can re-verify against a current, valid license) returns the install to normal operation. In the read-only stage, existing traffic was never interrupted, so recovery is a matter of the next successful verification clearing the degraded state.

If the underlying problem is the license rather than the network (for example, an expired license), the path back to normal is a refreshed/renewed license — see License model.

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Practical guidance for operators

• Make sure your firewall permits the outbound HTTPS egress in the egress allow-list. The product needs to reach api.specaria.io to verify and re-verify.
• Treat a persistent licensing warning banner as an operational signal: connectivity to the platform has been down long enough to matter, and you have a bounded window to fix it before writes are blocked.
• Remember the asymmetry: a heartbeat or update-poll failure in the logs is expected to be harmless (fail open). A verification failure is the one that eventually has teeth (fail closed).

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All Specaria SOAP to REST docs