RAD Stack — Platform Template

The Half That Does Not Change

Every project built on the RAD Stack makes its own application choices. None of them make their own choices about what the host provides — the Application Template is written against a defined interface: what the host guarantees, not which technology provides it. This template is one implementation of that interface, settled once in My RAD Stack and reused across every deployment that adopts it as-is.

Why an Interface Rather Than a Dependency

Because the real benefit is not that every project shares one host configuration — it is that the application never needs to know which host configuration it is running against. As long as an implementation honors the interface, the application template runs on it. This one is the default, but a team with different constraints — a different cloud, a different compliance baseline, a different OS — can build a different implementation and keep everything above the interface unchanged.

That also solves the drift problem a vendored copy would create. Projects using this implementation pull it in by version rather than copying its files, so a fix made here reaches them without a manual merge. Projects that built their own implementation were never coupled to this one in the first place — they only ever depended on the contract.

What It Covers

The interface is defined at the level of guarantees, not products, so an implementation can satisfy it however fits the team building it. This one currently covers:

Application Platform — a hardened OS baseline, mandatory access control, a host firewall, process management, scheduled tasks, remote access, automatic patching, protected ingress, and a reverse proxy in front of the application.

Virtual Infrastructure — provisioning against bare metal, a self-hosted hypervisor, or any cloud provider’s VM service, with snapshots where the layer provides them.

Recovery — the restore path the stack is designed around: infrastructure reprovisioned from code, data restored from continuous replication and file backup, rather than redundancy engineered for zero downtime.

What It Is Not

It is not the only valid implementation, and adopting the interface does not mean adopting this one. It is not a platform to run applications on either, and not a layer standing between the application and the host — the interface is a contract the host must satisfy, not a runtime the application talks to.

Status

Just starting development, alongside the Application Template. The split into two artifacts is a design decision made early rather than a refactor of something already shipped.

If You Need More Than a Repository

This gets a team running on the interface; it does not help a team decide whether this implementation fits their constraints, or apply it against infrastructure the template did not anticipate. That is RAD Stack Adoption instead.