Control Systems

Action
Guardrails.

Why autonomous agents must never have full sovereignty. Balancing self-healing with strictly defined blast-radius control.

Reliability Tier Safety Layer
Mechanism Blast Radius
Read Time Analysis
Primary Tools Control Loop

The sovereignty Loop vs. The Kill-Switch

In the pursuit of "No-Ops," there is a dangerous temptation to grant AI agents full access to production. This is a mistake. An autonomous agent is only as reliable as its guardrails. Without limits, a small error in reasoning can lead to a mass container deletion or a global configuration rollback.

At SRE-Space, our **Fixer Agent** operates under a set of rigid boundaries. It cannot act if the **Brain Agent's** confidence is below the safety threshold, and it cannot affect a significant portion of the fleet simultaneously.

Analogy // The Thermal Fuse 1. **Autonomy**: A smart thermostat adjusts your furnace based on room temp (the AI agent).
2. **The Guardrail**: A hard-coded limit prevents setting the temp above the safety limit (the Decision Boundary).
3. **The Fuse**: A physical thermal fuse melts and cuts power if the system overheats (the Hard Constraint).
Guardrails are the physical reality that prevents autonomous logic from burning the "house" down.

Human-in-the-Loop: When to Hand Over

For high-risk actions—like database schema changes or primary region failovers—we require a human-in-the-loop. The **Brain Agent** presents the evidence, the proposed fix, and the risk assessment to an on-call engineer, who provides the final "GO" signal.

// Confidence & Boundary Check if (brain.confidence < safety_threshold || action.impact_radius > max_blast_radius) { await_human_approval(action_plan); } else { fixer.execute(action_plan); }

Blast-Radius Control

Every remediation is executed as a "canary fix." The **Fixer Agent** applies the change to a single node, waits for **Scout** to confirm that the SLIs have normalized, and only then proceeds to the rest of the cluster. This ensures that even a "bad" fix is contained before it becomes a customer-facing catastrophe.