Roadmap: lightweight and extensible render farm foundations

[loonghao]

What to build

Track the public roadmap for keeping Renderacre lightweight to deploy while making the control plane durable, resource-aware, observable, and ready for future database and cloud integrations.

Guiding principles:

• Keep the first deployment shape small: controller, worker, shared storage, and an optional dashboard.
• Prefer SQLite as the default durable backend, with clean seams for Postgres and managed/cloud backends later.
• Keep OpenJD as the portable job contract and avoid coupling the core scheduler to a specific DCC application.
• Preserve the current REST and Python submitter contracts where possible.
• Add production behavior as vertical slices that can be shipped and tested independently.

Acceptance criteria

• The child issues cover durability, long-running lease correctness, resource-aware scheduling, operator controls, observability, and lightweight deployment.
• Each child issue is small enough to be implemented and verified independently.
• Public issue text avoids local machine details, private infrastructure details.

Blocked by

None - can start immediately.

[loonghao]

Closing this roadmap tracker as complete. The child slices now cover the requested production foundations and were each implemented independently:

• Durability and storage seams: Add a durable SQLite scheduler backend with pluggable storage seams #3 / PR feat: add sqlite scheduler backend #14
• Long-running lease correctness: Renew task leases during long-running execution #4 / PR feat: renew task leases during execution #13
• Worker capacity and resource-aware scheduling: Honor worker slot capacity with concurrent task execution #5, Route tasks by worker labels, pools, and resource requirements #6, Add shared resource and license limits #8 / PRs feat: honor worker slot capacity #15, feat: route tasks by worker requirements #16, feat: add shared resource limits #18
• Operator lifecycle controls: Add job and task lifecycle controls for operators #7 / PR feat: add queue lifecycle controls #17
• Attempt logs, artifacts, and failure reports: Persist per-attempt logs, artifacts, and failure reports #9 / PR feat: persist task attempt records #19
• Observability: Expose health, metrics, and audit events #10 / PR feat: expose farm observability endpoints #20
• Cloud-ready extension contracts: Define cloud-ready backend and execution extension contracts #12 / PR feat: define cloud extension contracts #21
• Lightweight deployment profile: Package a one-command lightweight deployment profile #11 / PR feat: package lightweight deployment profile #22

The remaining roadmap acceptance criteria are therefore satisfied without a separate code change for this parent issue.