# Production Hardening and Governance ## Objective This document defines operational governance for live trading. It assumes trading can lose money quickly when operational discipline is weak. Governance must therefore be explicit, logged, and testable. ## Governance Domains 1. Runtime safety 2. Access control 3. Config integrity 4. Release approval 5. Incident response 6. Auditability 7. Reporting and review ## Runtime Safety Controls Mandatory controls: - kill switch with immediate new-order disable - no-trade mode - degraded mode classification by source and subsystem - hard daily loss limit - hard gross exposure limit - hard net exposure limit - per-symbol and per-sector caps - stale-data rejection for mandatory inputs - duplicate order prevention - restart-safe state recovery ## Access Control Minimum roles: - Operator: may start/stop jobs and review health, but may not change strategy logic. - Approver: may approve live rollout stage changes and exceptional trades. - Engineer: may deploy code through approved process, but not bypass approvals. - Auditor: read-only access to logs, configs, incidents, and trade history. ## Configuration Governance - All live configs must be versioned and immutable after activation. - Any manual override must create an audit log. - Runtime should record exact config hash used for each trade. - Config changes may not be applied mid-session unless emergency procedure is used. ## Release Gates A release may move to live only if: - code passed all required tests - migration steps were rehearsed - rollback steps are documented - a release note exists with risk classification - dry-run or replay evidence is attached - approval is recorded ## Emergency Procedures Emergency actions include: - disable new orders - cancel open non-protective orders - force no-trade mode - disable specific adapters or overlays - revert to previous known-good config - pause stage promotion Each emergency action must be logged with who, when, why, and expected blast radius. ## Incident Governance Incidents are classified by severity: - Sev-1: material financial or safety risk; immediate intervention required. - Sev-2: significant malfunction but contained. - Sev-3: degraded behavior with workaround. - Sev-4: cosmetic or low-risk issue. For every incident, capture: - detection time - impacted systems - first symptom - trades affected - capital at risk - mitigation taken - root cause - corrective action - prevention action ## Audit Requirements The system must retain for each trade: - strategy id - config version/hash - code version/build id - parser version - feature version - approval state - order lifecycle events - reconciliation outcome - post-trade review id ## Governance Meetings - Daily ops review: incidents, fills, reconciliation, drift alerts. - Weekly strategy ops review: attribution, execution drift, parser quality, config exceptions. - Monthly governance review: stage eligibility, risk policy adherence, release quality, recurring issues.