Design documents

Proposals and plans, not a description of current behaviour

These are proposals and plans written while features were being designed. They explain the reasoning behind the external broker and database features, but they are not a description of how Bitween works today. Much of what they propose was built differently or not at all.

Document	Status on 11 September 2026
external-brokers-architecture.md	Proposal. Written against an earlier branch. Shipped differently: resident serverless adapters instead of in-process plugins, and no cluster API, node registry or outbox.
provider-plan-rabbitmq-kafka.md	Plan. RabbitMQ shipped in a smaller form. Kafka was not built.
provider-plan-databases.md	Plan with partial status notes, some of them out of date. Four engines, statements and the UI shipped. Explain, bulk load, push ingress and several metrics did not.

For how the features actually behave, read Data sources, External brokers and Databases.