Message Envelope
Metadata carried with messages for AI workflows.
In DriftQ-Core, a message can carry an envelope — metadata that travels with the message and controls how it should be handled.
Mental model: payload = the work, envelope = the rules around that work.
Common envelope fields
An envelope can include fields like:
tenant_id— multi-tenant separation / accountingidempotency_key— prevents duplicate side effects across retriesdeadline— stop doing this work after a certain point in timeretry_policy— max attempts + backoff parameters
Why these matter
They let producers define reliability and safety expectations once, and DriftQ-Core enforces them consistently.
Why the envelope is a big deal
The envelope is the “control plane” for the message. It’s also how DriftQ evolves beyond a broker: it becomes the foundation for routing decisions, safety constraints, and workflow control.
- Routing: policy-driven routing / partitions / priority
- Retries: consistent backoff + termination rules
- Budgets: cost caps, rate limits, tenant quotas
- Tracing: end-to-end workflow/agent tracing metadata
Roadmap note: DriftQ-Core is the broker repo you can run today. The envelope is what enables DriftQ (the overall project) to grow into a workflow runtime in v2+.