Explanation

Explanation answers why. These pages are discursive and opinionated: they make the design choices and the rejected alternatives visible. They do not teach a procedure (use the tutorials) and they do not list the facts (use the reference).

• What is AWC — the product thesis and who it is for.
• Architecture — control plane, data plane, and the CAS.
• Content addressing — immutability, digests, and why cross-tenant deduplication is forbidden.
• Overlay, cache, and singleflight — the read and write model on each host.
• The durability model — explicit durability versus fsync, and what survives host loss.
• Fencing and split-brain — lease generations and optimistic publication.
• Economics and cost model — the ratios that justify AWC.
• Security model — trust boundaries, mTLS, mount tickets.
• Lifecycle states — snapshot, workspace, mount, lease.
• Metadata normalization — source-normalized versus environment-preserving.
• Scope discipline — what AWC is not, and why.
• Measuring AWC — how to benchmark fairly.
• Design decisions — the fixed architecture decisions and the tracked risks.
• Reference-path correctness — why every optimization must equal the slow path.