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China Market Architecture

Zen Mesh is developing a regional strategy for China-connected businesses. This architecture defines how Zen Mesh will deliver critical payment and platform callbacks to your regional or private systems while maintaining payload locality and security boundaries.

High-Level Architecture​

Control Plane vs. Traffic Plane Separation​

Canadian Control Plane

  • Governs delivery policies
  • Manages resource allocation and identity
  • Receives only bounded operational metadata
  • Generates evidence and audit logs

Regional China-Market Traffic Plane

  • Receives customer event payloads
  • Processes them locally (verification, transformation, routing)
  • Delivers to configured destinations
  • Generates local evidence

Regional Options Under Evaluation​

OptionStatusNotes
Canadian control-planePlannedCanadian-based governance
Regional China-market Traffic PlanePlannedRegional payload processing
Hong Kong Traffic PlaneUnder evaluationAccount and ingress feasibility review
Mainland China Traffic PlaneAccount feasibility reviewNot production-live yet

Regional deployed proof: NOT YET PRODUCTION-LIVE

Regional Architecture Details​

Control Plane​

Location: Canadian-based for China market strategy

Responsibilities:

  • Resource identifier allocation (zen-workload:xxx)
  • Policy version enforcement
  • Cryptographic digest generation for payloads
  • Health monitoring and operational visibility
  • Delivery outcome tracking
  • Audit receipt generation
  • Evidence manifest generation and maintenance

Payload Handling:

  • Receives only bounded operational metadata
  • Never receives full customer event payloads
  • Never proxies, replicates, or retains event payloads

Traffic Plane​

Location: Regional China-market Traffic Plane (planned) or customer-owned

Responsibilities:

  • Receive customer event payloads from providers
  • Verify payload integrity (signatures, digests)
  • Transform payloads as needed
  • Route to configured destinations (public HTTP, Edge Lite, Kubernetes Edge Plane)
  • Handle retries and error recovery
  • Generate delivery evidence

Payload Handling:

  • Receives full customer event payloads
  • Processes all payload logic locally
  • Never sends payloads to control plane
  • Only sends bounded metadata to control plane

Provider Pack Roadmap​

Antom/Alipay (IN DEVELOPMENT)​

Scope:

  • Asynchronous payment notifications
  • Signature verification (RSA)
  • Acknowledgement and duplicate handling
  • Active inquiry/reconciliation
  • Private or regional delivery

Documentation:

  • Antom Docs — Official Alipay developer documentation

Status: IN DEVELOPMENT (not GA)

WeChat Pay (IN DEVELOPMENT)​

Scope:

  • Payment-success callbacks
  • Signature and encryption (HMAC-SHA256, AES-256-GCM)
  • HTTPS endpoint posture
  • Firewall/IP considerations
  • Retries and duplicate notifications
  • Idempotent processing

Documentation:

Status: IN DEVELOPMENT (not GA)

UnionPay (PLANNED)​

Scope:

  • Backend notification URL
  • Asynchronous transaction results
  • Signature verification
  • Response deadline handling
  • Retry behavior
  • Reconciliation support

Documentation:

Status: PLANNED (research complete, implementation not started)

Secondary Candidates (RESEARCH ONLY)​

  • Feishu (Research)
  • DingTalk (Research)
  • WeCom (Research)
  • Chinese commerce platforms (Research)

Delivery Targets​

Public HTTP Endpoints​

No deployment required. Simply configure your endpoint URL in Zen Mesh. Payloads are delivered directly to your public HTTP endpoint.

Edge Lite Docker Runtime​

Deploy Zen Mesh Edge Lite as a Docker container to any Docker-compatible host. Ideal for private targets behind NAT or firewalls.

Requirements:

  • Docker runtime
  • Docker-compatible host (Kubernetes node, bare metal, cloud VM)
  • Network access to Zen Mesh Traffic Plane

Kubernetes Edge Plane​

Deploy Zen Mesh as a Kubernetes deployment for private networks.

Requirements:

  • Kubernetes cluster
  • Ingress configuration
  • Service account with appropriate RBAC
  • TLS certificate for ingress

Security Boundaries​

Traffic Plane Isolation​

The Traffic Plane is isolated from the control plane:

  • Network isolation: Traffic Plane does not communicate with control plane for payload processing
  • Data isolation: Payloads stay in Traffic Plane, only metadata may cross boundary
  • Authentication: Each Traffic Plane instance has unique workload identity
  • mTLS: Internal communications use mTLS for security

Control Plane Boundaries​

Control plane only receives bounded metadata:

  • Resource identifiers
  • Policy versions
  • Cryptographic digests
  • Health metrics
  • Delivery outcomes
  • Audit receipts
  • Evidence metadata

Provider Integration Security​

For Chinese payment provider integrations:

  1. Public endpoint: Zen Mesh provides stable public callback endpoint
  2. Provider notification: Providers send webhooks to Zen Mesh
  3. Traffic Plane processing: Webhooks are processed in Traffic Plane (local verification, transformation, routing)
  4. Destination delivery: Payloads are delivered to your configured destinations
  5. No control-plane relay: Provider payloads never reach the control plane

Provider-Specific Considerations​

Antom/Alipay​

  • Notification URL: Asynchronous payment notifications
  • Signature verification: RSA signature
  • Duplicate handling: Duplicate notification detection
  • Acknowledgement: Positive/negative acknowledgement
  • Reconciliation: Active inquiry support

WeChat Pay​

  • Notification URL: Payment-success callbacks
  • Signature verification: HMAC-SHA256
  • Encryption: AES-256-GCM for sensitive data
  • HTTPS: Required endpoint posture
  • Deduplication: Duplicate notification handling

UnionPay​

  • Notification URL: Backend notification URL
  • Signature verification: RSA signature
  • Response deadline: Provider specifies deadline for response
  • Retry behavior: Automatic retry on failure
  • Reconciliation: Support for reconciliation queries

Operational Considerations​

Retry and Error Recovery​

Zen Mesh provides built-in retry logic for provider notifications:

  • Exponential backoff: Retry with increasing delay
  • Max retries: Configurable max retry attempts
  • Dead letter: Failed deliveries go to dead letter queue for inspection
  • Duplicate detection: Deduplication based on provider-provided IDs

Monitoring and Observability​

Traffic Plane:

  • Real-time delivery status
  • Error rates and failure reasons
  • Retry counts and success/failure patterns
  • Destination delivery status

Control Plane:

  • Resource utilization
  • Policy violations
  • Evidence manifest generation
  • Audit logs

Evidence Generation​

For every delivery:

  1. Traffic Plane: Generates delivery evidence (timestamp, provider ID, destination, status)
  2. Control Plane: Aggregates evidence into manifest (commit SHA, evidence version, maturity labels)
  3. Evidence Manifest: Publicly accessible at /ai/evidence/v1/manifest.json

Non-Claims​

Explicitly not claimed at this time:

  • Chinese Provider Packs are not generally available yet (development in progress, not GA)
  • Zen Mesh is not claiming AWS program acceptance or partnership
  • Mainland China hosting is not production-live yet (account feasibility review only)
  • ICP recordal is not complete unless separately proven
  • Chinese regulatory compliance is not claimed
  • Payload-locality production enforcement is scoped by current evidence (architectural commitment, not production evidence)
  • Provider sandbox fixtures are not provider production validation (sandbox testing, not production validation)
  • No guaranteed or exactly-once delivery claim (standard retry/recovery, not exact-once guarantee)

Future Integration​

Mode B Integration​

As regional deployments mature, Zen Mesh will support Mode B integration for advanced use cases:

  • Customer-directed cross-region delivery
  • Regional-specific policies
  • Localized monitoring and alerts
  • Regional evidence aggregation

Current Maturity​

Status labels:

  • China market strategy: ACTIVE
  • Provider Packs: IN DEVELOPMENT
  • Payload locality: ARCHITECTURAL_COMMITMENT
  • Canadian control-plane: PLANNED
  • Regional Traffic Plane: PLANNED
  • Hong Kong Traffic Plane: UNDER EVALUATION
  • Mainland China Traffic Plane: ACCOUNT FEASIBILITY REVIEW
  • Regional deployed proof: NOT YET PRODUCTION-LIVE

Conclusion​

Zen Mesh's China market architecture maintains strict separation between control plane and Traffic Plane, ensuring payload locality and security. Control plane receives only bounded operational metadata. Traffic Plane receives, processes, and delivers customer event payloads locally. Provider Pack templates provide structured defaults for verification, event classification, and operational visibility.

Regional deployed proof: NOT YET PRODUCTION-LIVE (as of 2026-08-05)