Glossary

Authoritative definitions for terms used across docs, code, and customer-facing material. If a term is ambiguous, define it here before using it.

Term	Definition
Adapter	A per-provider component that translates the canonical AI-ESB request format into a specific provider’s API format and back.
AI-ESB	This product. AI Enterprise Service Bus.
Audit log / Audit ledger	The append-only, hash-chained, tamper-evident record of everything that happens in the system.
BYOK	Bring Your Own Key. Customer-managed encryption keys held in the customer’s KMS, used to wrap AI-ESB-generated data keys.
Compliance pack	The bundle of control mappings, evidence, and attestations supporting a regulatory framework (e.g. SOC 2, HIPAA).
Control plane	The administrative side of AI-ESB — tenant management, billing, licensing, policy authoring. Separate from the data plane.
Data plane	The request-handling side — gateway, router, adapters. Optimised for throughput.
Data residency	The geographic constraint on where data can be processed and stored, set per-tenant or per-request.
Egress	A request leaving AI-ESB toward an external model provider.
Eval / Eval harness	The system that runs golden test fixtures to verify routing decisions, redaction behaviour, and end-to-end quality.
Failover chain	An ordered list of providers/models the router will try in sequence if the primary fails.
FinOps	Financial operations — cost tracking, budgeting, chargeback, optimisation.
Gateway	The edge service handling auth, rate limiting, and request orchestration. The front door.
Industry pack	A bundle of routing rules, prompt templates, policies, and compliance mappings tailored to a vertical (healthcare, finance, etc.).
Licence (on-prem)	A signed JWT containing feature flags, expiry, and customer ID, validated at runtime by on-prem deployments.
Markup	The margin AI-ESB adds on top of provider costs (where applicable to the commercial model).
OPA / Rego	Open Policy Agent and its policy language. Used for policy evaluation.
Pack	Shorthand for industry pack.
PII / PHI	Personally Identifiable Information / Protected Health Information. Subject to detection and redaction.
Policy	A versioned, declarative rule that constrains what requests can do. Inbound or outbound.
Principal	An authenticated identity — human user or service account.
Project	A logical grouping inside a tenant; typically one application or team.
Redaction	Removing or tokenising sensitive content from a request before it leaves the trust boundary.
Residency tag	The geographic constraint attached to a request (US, EU, AU, UK, …).
Router	The component that decides which model handles a given request.
Semantic cache	A cache keyed on embeddings, returning previous responses for semantically similar prompts.
Sub-processor	An external service (e.g. Anthropic, OpenAI) that processes customer data on AI-ESB’s behalf.
Tenant	A customer organisation. The unit of isolation, billing, policy, and contract.
Trust centre	The customer-facing site exposing certifications, sub-processors, and security posture.
Walking skeleton	The minimum end-to-end working slice; M1 of the roadmap.