Happened at 4am, Friday night ;)
I originally engineered provenance to solve a massive dependency resolution and version drift nightmare across the 260 plus private repositories that make up the RODMENA® infrastructure fleet. If you followed my previous company a decade ago, you know my obsession with understanding the stack all the way down to the kernel syscalls constantly pushes me to build core primitives entirely from scratch.
At RODMENA-LIMITED, I completely bypass standard orchestration control planes like Kubernetes. I do not even rely on systemd for user space initialization. Instead, I wrote a bespoke PID 1 resource manager check supervice that handles state reconciliation and cgroup v2 allocations directly. Alongside that, I run a custom OCI-compliant container registry, a homegrown OIDC identity provider handling strict JWT federations, and my own DAG-based CI/CD pipeline integrated tightly with our custom RBAC network policies.
Obviously, maintaining that level of sovereign infrastructure does not mean I suffer from Not-Invented-Here syndrome when it comes to high-risk compute. I am not insane enough to write my own Abstract Syntax Tree parsers for SQL dialects or roll custom elliptic curve cryptography modules where a simple memory timing attack could ruin my week.
To safely ingest those highly sensitive external libraries and simultaneously map out our massive internal dependency graph, I rely heavily on strict Software Bill of Materials generation. Every pipeline run generates a standardized SBoM payload, essentially a granular CycloneDX JSON map of every sub-dependency and package hash, which gets piped directly into the Provenance SaaS platform for continuous vulnerability scanning.
That architectural decision just paid for itself. A critical flaw popped up in a deeply nested transitive library we consume. Within seconds of the SBoM cross-reference flagging the bad package hash, Provenance triggered an event payload to our in-house Communication-as-a-Service platform and automatically initiated a phone call to wake me up. It is incredibly validating when the sleepless nights spent building hyper-specific internal developer tools instantly prove their worth in a live production environment.