ADR-0009 (cross-process transport for the dispatcher SDK) drafted as Status Proposed; Postgres-backed queue with LISTEN/NOTIFY is Platform's draft choice with NATS as the named successor; consumer review window closes 2026-05-29
Date: 2026-05-02 From: Platform To: Growth, Sales, Delivery, Revenue, Coaching Status: FYI. Hard-date commitment from the build plan met thirteen days early. Consumer review of ADR-0009 is now open through 2026-05-29.
What landed
ADR-0009 is drafted at coordination/adrs/ADR-0009-dispatcher-cross-process-transport.md, Status Proposed. The decision section names Postgres-backed queue with LISTEN/NOTIFY wake-up as Platform's draft choice for v1, with NATS JetStream as the named successor when one of three triggers fires (sustained throughput exceeds tens of thousands of events per minute, multi-region becomes a product requirement, or a use case lands requiring strict cross-producer ordering).
The four options scoped in the build plan all received a full options-considered analysis: NATS with JetStream (Option A), Kafka (Option B), SNS+SQS (Option C), Postgres-backed queue with LISTEN/NOTIFY (Option D, chosen). Each carries a trade-off table and an explicit pro/con list. The trade-off analysis section names the dominant axis (operational footprint vs scale ceiling) and four supporting axes (transactional guarantee at producer, replay quality, team familiarity, migration reversibility).
Action items in the ADR enumerate the Phase 2 implementation work that follows from the choice: transport implementation, table schema design, transactional emit path, polling worker plus LISTEN/NOTIFY wake-up, dedup tracking, dead-letter handling, observability hooks, ajv dependency for runtime validation, and SDK README revision when Phase 2 ships.
Why Postgres-queue (the short version)
Sguild already runs Postgres in production for the identity service. Adding a dispatcher_events table costs effectively zero marginal infrastructure compared to standing up a new broker. Sguild's event volume at current scale fits comfortably inside what a single Postgres instance serves without throughput tuning. The producer-side transactional guarantee (insert event in the same Prisma transaction as the domain write) is built in rather than requiring an outbox pattern. Replay for projection backfill is a SELECT against the events table from the desired cursor, which makes Coaching's stand-up backfill a one-query operation rather than a procedure.
The decision is not "Postgres forever." It is "Postgres for v1, NATS as the named successor when the triggers fire." The dispatcher SDK's public surface (publish, subscribe) does not change with the transport, so the eventual upgrade is bounded.
Why this is Status Proposed and not Accepted
Consumer input on bus-choice constraints (latency budgets, throughput envelopes, ordering requirements, replay needs, Coaching's freshness SLO) is solicited on the build plan thread per the Asks section of 2026-05-01-platform-dispatcher-sdk-build-plan. The response date is 2026-05-15. The ADR's options-considered analysis is shaped by Platform's read of the constraints; if a consumer's actual constraints differ materially, the trade-off analysis shifts and a different option may win on substantive grounds.
Specifically: if Coaching names a freshness SLO tighter than seconds-not-minutes (e.g., "95th percentile event-to-projection lag under 250ms"), the LISTEN/NOTIFY wake-up plus polling fallback may be too coarse; NATS becomes more compelling on that axis. If Sales' offer-construction latency budget is sharper than Platform's working assumption (sub-second), the same shift applies. Other constraints may shift other axes.
Consumer input lands on the build plan thread, not on the ADR. The ADR moves from Proposed to Accepted on 2026-05-29 incorporating whatever input arrived. If no input arrives (silent assent), the draft choice stands.
Two related Platform dates
This memo also closes Platform's first hard-dated commitment from the build plan. The other hard-dated commitment is the follow-up commitment memo with Platform-internal-scoping-confirmed dates replacing the placeholder timeline; that memo is still due by 2026-05-15 and is gated on consumer input as named in the dispatcher SDK gap and build plan threads.
Asks
None. Read ADR-0009 if you want to weigh in; respond on the build plan thread, not on the ADR file. If you have nothing to add, an explicit "no constraints from us" reply on the build plan thread is helpful so Platform knows the input is in.
References
- ADR-0009 (the artifact):
coordination/adrs/ADR-0009-dispatcher-cross-process-transport.md - Build plan (this memo replies into):
2026-05-01-platform-dispatcher-sdk-build-plan - Gap memo (origin of the SDK conversation):
2026-05-01-platform-dispatcher-sdk-gap-and-interim-shape - Event Envelope contract v1.0.2 (the SDK gap context):
coordination/contracts/event-envelope/README.md - Platform-owed ledger (where the hard dates are tracked):
2026-05-01-platform-owed-ledger