Documentation

The Forge Platform consists of the following discreet repositories:

Repository	Visibility	Description
forge-kit	Public	Infrastructure components for Quarkus services: rate limiting, metrics, health checks.
forge-core	Private	A zero-trust, horizontally scalable microservices platform built with Quarkus, and deployed on AWS.
forge-platform	Private	A filtered mirror of forge-core that clients will fork, own and run with a licence.
forge-docs	Public	This public documentation repository.

forge-kit is open-sourced and intended as a limited but useful showcase of operational best practices that anyone can re-use with existing Quarkus services. It is also a working dependency of forge-core.

How it works

• You purchase a Forge Platform licence file from the Forge Platform website.
• Your organization is added as a Contributor, so you can fork the forge-platform repository.
• You then own and develop that forked codebase.
• You provision the provided CI/CD workflows in your own GitHub account (works in free tier GitHub Actions).
• You deploy the platform to your own AWS accounts (development works in free tier AWS).
• You receive any future platform updates by syncing your fork to the upstream forge-platform repository.

What you get

Out of the box, the Forge Platform provides you with the following:

• A development environment built predominantly on free tier LocalStack that emulates AWS in full and spins up in seconds.

• An entire GitHub Actions pipeline which includes release automation; ECS deployments (diffed services only); infrastructure deployments (CDK); static code analysis (OWASP, SpotBugs, etc); code coverage, unit/integration test reports, and more.

• Full IaC support and repeatable automation for AWS environments, including thoughtful segregation of stateful vs stateless resources.

• A clean, well-documented, and well-tested codebase that you can fork and modify.
• A stateless reference web application that you can deploy locally and to AWS and use immediately.

• The following foundational services provide the base for you to build domain services (e.g. search, quote, booking, etc.):

  • actor-service; canonical user profile and identity-linked domain data
  • audit-service; immutable event and action trail for compliance and observability
  • auth-service; JWT issuance, validation, and user/service authentication workflows
  • document-service; document metadata, storage orchestration, and retrieval APIs
  • notification-service; template-driven outbound messaging and delivery orchestration

• The following edge services that provide client-facing composition and delivery layers:

  • backend-actor; BFF orchestration tier
  • backend-web; disposable reference UI and consumable frontend

• Comprehensive Prometheus metrics and Grafana dashboards for observability.

For the complete list of platform features, see the FEATURES.md file.

Deployment architecture overview

Workloads and services

VPC / network

In-depth guides

Guide	Description
USER_AUTHENTICATION.md	JWT, Cognito form login, LinkedIn OAuth, filters, and OIDC configuration.
SERVICE_AUTHENTICATION.md	Service accounts, @AllowedServices, client filters.
CACHING.md	Quarkus Cache names and where they apply.
METRICS.md	Micrometer, /q/metrics, forge-kit metrics, local Grafana.
HEALTH_CHECK.md	Readiness checks, forge-health-aws, per-service wiring.
AUDIT_SERVICE.md	Audit library and audit-service HTTP ingest.
NOTIFICATION_SERVICE.md	Notification delivery, templates, SNS webhook spec.

Architecture Decision Records (ADRs)

ADRs are historical why records (context, trade-offs, alternatives). The full public index, redaction scope, and links to each decision can be found in architecture/ADRs.md.

Onboarding and operations runbooks

• README.md — first screen on GitHub; fork and setup narrative
• DEVELOPMENT.md — local dev, tooling, licence, Quarkus
• OPERATIONS.md — GitHub OIDC, Actions, CDK, AWS/LocalStack
• CHEATSHEET.md — task index and copy-paste
• infra/README.md — CDK layout and entry points