About
The board every card plugs into
Backplane is being built to run Spergs, LLC's own fleet: a handful of servers, workstations, laptops and small boards whose descriptions, health checks and deploy scripts had spread across a dozen places.
What Backplane is
A system of record for what each machine is, what it is actually doing, how healthy it is, and what has been applied to it, and the service that applies it. It is made of a C++ server, an observe-only agent that runs on each machine, a controller that runs Ansible over SSH, a dashboard, a command-line client, an MCP server for agents, and an Android app.
It is in early development. The design is written; the components exist as skeletons; none of it runs a machine yet.
What it is not
- Not multi-tenant. It is built for one fleet, ours, first.
- Not a remote shell. The agent reports; it never executes anything it is told to.
- Not a metrics store. Metrics and alert routing stay where they are; Backplane reads them.
- Not a secrets store. Secrets live in ambry, Spergs' secrets service, and runs fetch them by name.
The name
A backplane is the board at the back of a chassis that every card plugs into: it carries power and signals between them and does no computing of its own. That is the job here: the shared plane every machine is seated in, which knows where each one is and what it carries.
Who makes it
Backplane is built by Spergs, LLC, and made by notdsk.
Can I use it?
Not today. There is no download, no hosted version, no sign-up and no price. This site describes the design while it is built, and will say so plainly when that changes.