Why we're writing this
At RBX Systems, we believe that infrastructure work deserves the same visibility as product features. The cluster that powers Robson, TruthMetal, and everything else we build is itself a product. Our users, contributors, and future partners depend on it.
This post documents a significant infrastructure session we completed on March 28–29, 2026. No new features shipped, but the foundation got substantially stronger.
What changed
GitOps is now fully healthy
All of our applications are deployed through ArgoCD using the GitOps pattern: the only way to change anything in production is to commit to rbxrobotica/rbx-infra. This session resolved a longstanding issue where several applications were stuck in an inconsistent sync state, preventing automatic reconciliation.
The root cause was a subtle misconfiguration in how Kubernetes field ownership was being handled. After a systematic investigation across all deployed applications, every service is now in Synced + Healthy state.
This matters because a healthy GitOps pipeline means:
- Every change is auditable via
git log - Rollbacks take one
git revert - The cluster can be rebuilt from scratch at any time
A more resilient database architecture
We formalized an architectural decision that had been implicit for some time: ParadeDB, our PostgreSQL-compatible analytical database, runs on dedicated hardware outside the Kubernetes cluster.
This might seem counterintuitive when everything else runs in k8s, but it reflects a deliberate trade-off: application code is versioned in Git and can be redeployed in minutes. Data cannot. By decoupling the database lifecycle from the cluster lifecycle, we can wipe and reprovision the entire cluster without risking a byte of user data.
The services that connect to ParadeDB do so through a stable internal endpoint. The cluster is ephemeral; the data is not.
Pattern detection engine is live
Robson's pattern scanning subsystem (which detects candlestick and chart patterns like Hammer, Engulfing, Head & Shoulders, and Morning Star) is now running on a correct schedule in production.
The engine runs every 15 minutes, scanning configured trading pairs and persisting results to the database. It is idempotent: running the same scan twice produces no duplicate records.
This is part of CORE 1.0, the pattern detection layer of Robson's decision engine. CORE 1.2 (EntryGate, which translates pattern alerts into trade decisions) is next.
Cleanup and deprecations
We removed two placeholder applications (argos-radar and thalamus) that had no working implementation yet. Both will return when their respective products are ready, rebuilt from scratch under the rbxrobotica organization with proper CI/CD pipelines.
What this looks like in practice
Our infrastructure is defined entirely as code in a public repository. This is the current production state after this session:
| Service | Status |
|---|---|
| ArgoCD (GitOps controller) | Synced · Healthy |
| cert-manager (TLS) | Synced · Healthy |
| Robson (trading platform) | Synced · Healthy |
| TruthMetal (config ledger) | Synced · Healthy |
| rbx.ia.br | Synced · Healthy |
| rbxsystems.ch | Synced · Healthy |
All TLS certificates are automatically managed and renewed. All services self-heal if a pod crashes.
The open-source angle
The infrastructure that powers RBX Systems is being progressively open-sourced under the rbxrobotica GitHub organization.
If you run production Kubernetes with ArgoCD and GitOps, or if you're curious how a small team manages external databases alongside k8s workloads, the repository is public. Read it, fork it, learn from it.
We're looking for people working in:
- Robotics and automation (our core domain)
- Algorithmic trading (Robson is built for real-world execution)
- Distributed systems (TruthMetal is a general-purpose immutable parameter ledger)
- Infrastructure as Code (the entire cluster is reproducible from a single Ansible playbook)
Found a bug? Open an issue. Have an idea? Start a discussion. Want to contribute? The door is open.
What is coming next
- CORE 1.2: EntryGate (pattern alerts become actionable trade signals)
- Strategos: strategy authoring and backtesting platform
rbxroboticaorg migration (all repos moving from personal accounts to the organization)
We build in the open. Follow along.
The RBX Systems Engineering Team