Proposal

Two engineers, one quarter, to split ingestion

Ask of: Platform director · Needed by: 2026-09-01 · Author: Platform

The ask

Two engineers for one quarter to ship RFC 014 — split the ingestion queue so a single queue failure degrades throughput instead of stopping ingestion.

Rationale

Four of the last six incidents ended as a full ingestion stop. Ingestion is 41% of platform footprint. Doing this later, during a worse incident, costs more than a planned quarter.

Verified: incident list and inventory snapshot in RFC 014.

Cost

• Two engineers, twelve weeks. Opportunity cost: the catalog backfill slips a quarter.
• Ongoing: one extra queue and consumer group to operate.
• Hard to quantify: pages we do not take when the next backpressure arrives.

Alternatives

• Do nothing. Continue at roughly one halt per quarter.
• Larger single queue. Cheaper this quarter; does not remove the failure mode. Rejected in RFC 014.

Decision needed

Platform director, by 2026-09-01. If there is no decision, the default is do nothing — which is a choice, and should be recorded as one.