For ML and platform teams that already own a model

From business intent
to reliable outcomes.

Cairn is a control plane for building, executing, evaluating and continuously improving AI/ML workloads across distributed infrastructure.

Connect data, compute and decisions in a process your team can inspect and improve.

Official focus: ML · Data · Cloud & platform infrastructure

FROM BUSINESS INTENT TO VERIFIED OUTCOME
Your business process, governed across distributed infrastructureA business objective becomes a domain pipeline. Cairn checks the request, tracks the run and evaluates the evidence. Selected workers execute the job and return results. Reviewed feedback informs a subsequent run. Your business objectiveBetter predictions · reliable data · safer releases Domain pipelineDefined steps, shared formats and decision rules cairnCONTROL PLANE Check & approveTrack executionEvaluate & decide Submit jobReturn evidence Your execution infrastructureCPU / GPU workers · your chosen engine · external service Versioned outputs + decision evidence

Business rules stay in the domain pack. Vendor connections stay in your deployment settings. Execution support varies by backend.

How a pipeline runs

Train, evaluate, improve —
until the eval passes.

A fine-tune pipeline as cairn runs it. The first attempt misses the target, so the run is diagnosed and a better candidate goes round again. Only a passing eval reaches a person, and only a person promotes.

  1. Prepare data
  2. Cost gate
  3. Train
  4. Evaluate
  5. Diagnose
  6. Improve
  7. Human review
  8. Promote
attempt 1
of the loop
—
eval score · target 45%
$0.00
spent of the $40 cap
Receipt · hash-chained
  1. prepare: 48,210 rows · 0 PII · 9f2a…
  2. cost gate: estimate $31 ≤ cap $40
  3. train #1 on your GPU · adapter v11 · 38 min
  4. eval #1: 41.0% < 45% → failed
  5. diagnose: underfit · learning rate too low
  6. improve: lr ×2 · +12k rows → candidate v12
  7. train #2 · adapter v12 · 41 min
  8. eval #2: 49.1% ≥ 45% → passed
  9. gate: waiting for Dana → approved 12:04
  10. promote: adapter v12 → registry · lineage v11 → v12

Every step is its own governed run: a budget before it starts, a gate wherever a person should decide, a receipt whatever happens. Swap the steps and the same rules apply. The improvement cycle →

Your workload. Your business outcome.

One foundation.
Three kinds of work.

Eight ML workflows and nine agentic workflows. Nine industry blueprints to start from.

ML and agentic pipelines marked with a name ship with Cairn. Industry blueprints are reference designs and need a partner with the domain model and data access.

The console

What a governed run
looks like.

The same fine-tune, seen from the console: the pipeline and where it is waiting, every leg with its cost, the evaluation against its targets, and the decision a person is asked to make.

One pipeline, every leg its own run. Nine of ten steps done, $31.20 across the governed runs, paused on a human gate — and the console says so before you open anything.
cairn · Pipelines
A pipeline page: nine of ten steps done, $31.20 spent, waiting on the promote-model gate
Everything you started. A failed first attempt, the second one waiting on a reviewer, a promoted model — with what each cost.
cairn · Runs
The Runs list: each row a pipeline with its legs, status, what it is waiting on, cost and start time
Measured against its targets. 49.1% paraphrase accuracy on a 45% target, 2.1% hallucination under the 3% cap; a scorecard that says which numbers were captured, derived or human.
cairn · Evaluation
A run's Evaluation tab: paraphrase accuracy 49.1% against a 45% target, hallucination rate 2.1% against 3%, and a 1–5 quality scorecard
A person decides, with the evidence in front of them. The gate carries the eval delta, the cost against its cap, both adapter versions and the lineage of runs that produced them. The decision is recorded with who, when and why.
cairn · Approvals
The Approvals page: one gate awaiting a decision, with the evidence it was opened with — the eval delta, cost against cap, candidate and previous adapters — and the lineage of runs behind it

Seeded demo workspace; run it yourself with cairn dev --seed →

Improve with evidence

A failed run can inform
a better next attempt.

Capture the failure, decide how to respond and evaluate a new candidate. Keep the current approved result until the next one earns its place.

Explore the improvement cycle →
Bounded feedback process

Failure → review → candidate → evaluation

Retries address transient failures. Reviewed data and model changes address quality. Each follows its own limits and approval requirements.

No autonomous rewriting of workflows or policy.

Questions

Four things people ask first.

All questions on the Platform page →

Where does it run?

On your infrastructure. Docker Compose for a single box, a Helm chart for Kubernetes. SQLite to start, PostgreSQL in production.

Where does my data go?

Nowhere new. Data stays in your storage (S3, MinIO, GCS, your databases) and jobs run on your engines. Cairn keeps the record: what ran, what it cost, who approved.

Can I drive it from the terminal or CI?

Yes. The cairn CLI declares, runs and watches pipelines: cairn pipeline, cairn flow, cairn connect, cairn deploy, cairn worker. Anything the console does, the CLI does.

Is it open source?

Apache 2.0 licensed and self-hosted. Early access now; the source opens with the public release.

Shipping notes

What shipped, and
how to use it.

All posts →

Run it on your own infrastructure.

Apache 2.0 licensed, self-hosted. The quickstart gets a control plane with demo data running; a call gets your first pipeline onto it.