Promotion Gate Ownership Contract

Purpose

This contract freezes ownership for promotion gate decisions and defines the Policy-to-Orchestrator interface.

Ownership Rules

• Policy Engine owns PASS/FAIL gate evaluation semantics.
• Concelier owns advisory ingestion and linkset publication only.
• Release Orchestrator executes promotion state transitions using Policy outputs.
• Authority enforces identity/scope boundaries for all callers.

Explicit Non-Goals for Concelier

• No PASS/FAIL decisioning for promotion gates.
• No direct production of promotion allow/deny verdicts.
• No mutation of Policy-derived effective findings.

Policy Evaluation Interface

{
  "request": {
    "tenantId": "string",
    "promotionId": "guid",
    "targetEnvironment": "string",
    "artifactDigest": "sha256:...",
    "evidenceRef": "guid",
    "policyBundleDigest": "sha256:..."
  },
  "response": {
    "decision": "allow|deny|pending",
    "reasonCodes": ["string"],
    "policyDigest": "sha256:...",
    "determinismHash": "sha256:...",
    "evaluatedAtUtc": "2026-02-10T00:00:00Z"
  }
}

Determinism and Fail-Closed Rules

• Identical request payloads must produce identical decision outputs.
• Missing or invalid policy inputs MUST return explicit deny or pending according to policy profile; no implicit allow.
• Missing gate baselines MUST deny by default. warn and first-build bootstrap behavior require explicit request/configuration and MUST be reflected in gate evidence.
• Gate decision determinism hashes MUST be computed from a canonical decision payload that includes policy bundle identity, evidence references, unknown details, verdict content, and a decision-version marker. Run identifiers and wall-clock evaluation timestamps are excluded from the canonical hash.
• Reason codes must be stable and sortable for replay/audit.

Required Test Coverage

Promotion/Orchestrator side:

• src/ReleaseOrchestrator/__Tests/StellaOps.ReleaseOrchestrator.Promotion.Tests/Gate/PolicyGateTests.cs
• src/ReleaseOrchestrator/__Tests/StellaOps.ReleaseOrchestrator.Promotion.Tests/Decision/DecisionEngineTests.cs
• src/ReleaseOrchestrator/__Tests/StellaOps.ReleaseOrchestrator.Promotion.Tests/Gate/GateEvaluatorTests.cs

Policy side:

• src/Policy/__Tests/StellaOps.Policy.Engine.Tests/Gates/PolicyGateEvaluatorTests.cs
• src/Policy/__Tests/StellaOps.Policy.Engine.Tests/Determinism/PolicyEngineDeterminismTests.cs
• src/Policy/__Tests/StellaOps.Policy.Engine.Tests/Gates/Determinization/DeterminizationGateTests.cs

Integration References

• Evidence contract: docs/modules/evidence-locker/promotion-evidence-contract.md
• Promotion APIs: docs/modules/release-jobengine/api/promotions.md
• Runtime closure plan: docs/modules/release-jobengine/promotion-runtime-gap-closure-plan.md