What Switchboard is
Switchboard is Willdan's control plane: it connects AWS accounts, installs apps into environments, deploys builds through release channels, and runs the release process. Apps are built in their own repositories with their own CI; Switchboard owns everything after the artifact — where it runs, which version, who approved it, and what the organization sees in the Willdan apps portal.
Three ideas carry most of the model:
- An instance is app × environment. Installing a product creates an instance; deploying is always deploying one instance. The deploy-dispatcher state machine drives CloudFormation directly — there is no CI runner in the deploy path.
- Channels move versions; releases ship them. Every publish advances a
channel head (
alpha/<branch>,beta);stableadvances only when a release is approved. Environments follow channels. - The stack is the source of truth. Component versions, endpoints, and outputs are read back from the landed stack after every deploy — what landed, not what was asked.
Who this portal is for
Developers building an app that runs on Switchboard (start with the manifest and shared stacks), and the QA/implementation teams running releases (start with releases).
The APIs
Switchboard's primary API is GraphQL at AppSync, reached through this gateway — every console read and mutation lives there. The API reference here documents the deliberately narrow REST surface: the release process (what QA tooling, the operation-phase plugin, and regression agent runners drive) and manifest validation for CI — the callers that have no GraphQL client. Today it is stubbed, returning example payloads, so tooling builds against honest shapes.