Core concepts

Organization and estate

An organization is the tenant boundary. Membership, events, projections, evidence, and policy are organization-scoped. An estate represents one source system and environment under migration, such as a production Synapse estate or a staging SQL Server estate. Credentials never live in an estate record; it carries only an opaque connection reference.

Migration object

A migration object is a table, view, stored procedure, function, ETL job, or report. Its executive funnel is intentionally simple:

discovered → planned → converting → converted → certified → cutover
                     ↘ rework                    ↘ rollback/reconciliation
           excluded is a governed terminal lane

The funnel is a projection, not a substitute for evidence. converted means an artifact was produced. certified means the assigned validation profile resolved from admitted, fresh evidence and Airlift minted a signed certificate.

Readiness tracks

Nine tracks explain why an object can or cannot advance: inventory, target design, code, data movement, deployment, functional parity, non-functional evidence, business acceptance, and cutover readiness. A profile marks every track required or not_applicable; a required track resolves to pending, passed, failed, stale, or waived.

Wave

A wave freezes a set of objects into one rehearsable cutover unit. Airlift owns wave scope, approvals, gate evaluation, cutover decision, outcome, and rollback record. A wave does not absorb Runway deployment state, Radar observations, or Tower task completion; it references their stable IDs and digests when those products are present.

Evidence and certificates

The parity certificate states the depth of a functional or data comparison. The migration certificate is broader: Airlift derives and signs an envelope from the full readiness profile. A report digest is not a signature. See parity and migration certificates.