obsidianwall-verdict

ObsidianWall Verdict is a pre-deployment governance decision engine designed to evaluate infrastructure plans against organizational policies before deployment occurs. It addresses the challenge of aligning organizational intent with actual outcomes in programmable infrastructure environments by implementing the discipline of Programmable Assurance. This approach provides organizations with a way to catch budget overruns, policy violations, and compliance failures prior to deployment, aiming to ensure that governance is as programmable and accountable as the infrastructure it oversees.

The tool supports evaluation of Terraform plans and CloudFormation templates, automatically detecting the input format. It checks these plans against governance policies, mapping policy conditions to compliance frameworks such as HIPAA, SOC 2, CIS v8, and NIST AI RMF. Users can see which controls are covered and which are missing, helping to identify gaps before an audit. Verdict also includes simulation capabilities, allowing governance decisions to be tested against hypothetical scenarios without needing a real plan, and separates technical risk from governance risk. Post-deployment, its "Sentinel" feature verifies that the actual state of infrastructure matches the authorized governance decision, detecting drift and ensuring ongoing compliance.

ObsidianWall Verdict provides a full audit trail for governance decisions, with every decision linked to a named policy and the human author responsible for it. Its deterministic evaluation ensures that decisions are reproducible, explainable, and attributable, rather than relying on probabilistic models or AI-generated policy. Additional features include policy schema validation, CI regression testing, governance history analysis, explainability through reasoning chains and trace graphs, stakeholder notifications, per-decision manifests, risk scoring, and local storage of data using SQLite to ensure that information remains within the user's environment. Stored evaluations can be replayed for audit verification.

The tool is delivered as a command-line interface, installable via pip from PyPI, and also offers a GitHub Action for integration into CI/CD workflows. ObsidianWall Verdict is positioned as the first implementation of the Programmable Assurance discipline, focusing on executable governance, accountability, and continuous feedback in modern infrastructure environments.