🏫Concepts

The Conserver has five primitives. Everything you configure in config.yml is one of these.

Link

A link is the basic unit of processing in the Conserver. A link takes a single vCon and does one thing to it — transcribe, summarize, tag, redact, route, notify. The conserver ships 22 standard links (see Standard Links) and you can write custom links just by implementing a run(vcon_uuid, link_name, opts) -> str | None function.

Examples:

• Transcription (deepgram_link, openai_transcribe, wtf_transcribe): convert audio to text.

• Analysis (analyze, analyze_vcon, check_and_tag): apply an LLM to extract summaries, sentiment, labels.

• Routing & filtering (sampler, jq_link, tag_router): decide which vCons proceed.

• Integration (webhook, post_analysis_to_slack): notify external systems.

• Audit (scitt, datatrails): record proof on a transparency ledger.

Links are described by Redis keys with a link: prefix, loaded on startup from config.yml. A link can be a member of multiple chains.

Chain

A chain is a sequence of links applied to a vCon. The conserver iterates over each configured chain in the main event loop, popping vCon UUIDs from the chain's ingress lists (Redis lists), running them through every link in order, and either writing the result to the chain's storages, pushing the UUID onto egress lists for downstream consumers, or both.

If any link in a chain returns None, processing stops for that vCon — that's how sampler, jq_link, and tag_router (with forward_original: false) filter vCons mid-chain.

Chains are described by Redis keys with a chain: prefix and configured in the chains: section of config.yml. There is no practical limit to the number of chains or links per chain.

Storage

A storage is the durable destination for processed vCons. After a chain's last link runs, every storage configured for that chain receives the vCon (in parallel by default — controlled by CONSERVER_PARALLEL_STORAGE).

The conserver ships 14 storage backends (see Storage):

• Document stores: mongo, redis_storage, chatgpt_files, dataverse

• Relational: postgres

• Object stores / file systems: s3, file, sftp

• Search: elasticsearch, milvus

• Transparency & audit: scitt, spaceandtime

• Pipelines / proxies: vcon_mcp, webhook

Different chains can target different storages — that's how you route, say, transcribed customer-service calls to Postgres while sending the redacted public-facing version to S3.

Tracer

A tracer is the audit-trail counterpart to a link. While links change the vCon, tracers record what happened to it. The conserver invokes every configured tracer before the first link runs, after each link runs, and at chain completion — so the trail captures who processed what, when, and with what configuration.

Tracers are typically backed by a verifiable ledger (JLINC, DataTrails, or a SCITT transparency service). They're optional but recommended for any deployment that has to satisfy GDPR / CCPA right-to-know or right-to-erasure requirements. See Conserver Tracers for the full lifecycle and per-tracer reference.

Follower

A follower is a second conserver that polls another conserver via the REST API and mirrors its vCons. Use followers for federation, geo-distribution, or low-latency read replicas. See the followers: section of Configuring the Conserver for the configuration shape.