The Microcelium component surface
Everything below the waterline so your team can stay above it. Microcelium ships in five layers: platform components that run the fabric, Prism API packages that carry your business logic, agents that execute it autonomously, AI providers plugged in through a common gateway, and integrations with the third-party systems you already use. Pull what you need, ignore what you don't.
microcelium-ai gateway through one tool-calling interface — swap models without touching business logic.The running pieces of Microcelium
Each is built, deployed and scaled independently; each communicates over the message bus using the MDXF envelope.
| Component | Purpose | Tech stack | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Glass UI | Web + iOS/Android UI library. Dashboards, forms, charts, real-time feeds. Deploys as the Expo React Native frontend. |   TypeScript, React, React Native (Expo) |
Production (actively developed) |
| Sapphire UI (legacy) | Server-rendered UI layer. Running in production today; progressively replaced by Glass UI on new engagements. |  Laravel Blade, Livewire |
Production (legacy) |
| Prism API | Backend API layer. RESTful endpoints, JWT auth, schema-driven validation, WebSocket feeds. Assembled from Laravel packages. | Laravel (PHP) |
Production |
| Service Engine | Microservice orchestration. Lifecycle, scaling, health, configuration; SSH into the stack. |   Docker, SSH |
Production |
| Ingestion Engine | Multi-protocol data processing. Transform, validate, enrich, route to the message bus and storage. |  Python |
Production |
| Providers | Communication and integration connectors. AMQP, MQTT, REST, MCP, SSH, SAMBA, Syncthing, Email. |      Protocol adapters |
Production |
| Message Bus | Event backbone. Topic routing, durable messaging, dead-letter queues, cross-component event correlation. | RabbitMQ (AMQP) |
Production |
| Air (Sylph) | Edge and IoT platform. Near-edge processing, microcontroller support (Raspberry Pi Pico, ESP32), TimescaleDB. |  MicroPython, TimescaleDB |
Production (actively developed) |
| Observability (Medusa) | Monitoring below the waterline. System health, performance, security detection, cross-component correlation. |   Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Tempo |
Production |
| Pandora | ML/AI capabilities. Predictive analytics, intelligent automation, model serving to the fabric. | Python |
Production (actively developed) |
| micro-glue | Infrastructure as Code. Ansible-powered provisioning, docker-compose generation, Traefik routing. |   Ansible, Docker Compose, Traefik |
Production |
| Cargo Servers | The micro-machines that run containers. VMs and their storage, networking and firewall rules are provisioned and configured as code; Docker Compose stacks generated by micro-glue land on them. | Docker Engine on Ansible-provisioned VMs |
Production |
| Substrate | Foundation layer. Hypervisor, VMs, network, NFS storage. |  KVM, NFS, VLAN |
Production |
Specialised bridges to external systems
Gateways are dedicated microservices that translate between Microcelium's MDXF envelope on the message bus and the protocols, formats, or session models of a specific external surface. They keep that complexity out of the core packages.
AI Gateway
WebSocket relay for OpenAI Realtime and ElevenLabs TTS. Handles streaming sessions and tool-calling on behalf of the fabric so packages and agents see a uniform request/response model rather than vendor-specific socket protocols.
Tech: 
Node.js · Status: Production
Accounts Gateway
Accountancy integration bridge for Xero, QuickBooks, Sage, and FreeAgent. Normalises the four vendors' APIs into one MDXF surface so microcelium-payments and reporting code stay vendor-neutral.
Tech: Laravel (PHP) · Status: Production
New gateways follow the same pattern — a single service in any supported language or framework, one MDXF surface on the bus, vendor specifics hidden behind it.
The Laravel-modular backbone
Prism API is built as composable packages. microcelium-core is the foundation (base models and services, API framework, settings, caching, logging, auth guards, permission system); every other package depends on it. Opt into the rest.
Your platform's API ends up specific to your product. Only the business logic you need is exposed, keeping the security footprint lean — and every other package is one opt-in away when you want to extend it.
Solid cards ship today. Dashed cards are on the roadmap — currently part of a parent package, being separated into their own.
The backbone
Every Microcelium deployment runs on these. They provide the core runtime, identity, policy, and UI scaffolding the rest plug into.
Infrastructure foundation: base models and services, API framework, settings, caching, logging, auth guards, permission system.
Identity, authentication, authorisation, multi-tenancy, invites.
Branding, navigation, page framework, Blade component library.
Role-based policy engine with per-role settings overrides.
Immutable audit log — who did what, when and why — across every package and agent.
User lifecycle & compliance
Guided onboarding flows for new users and new tenants.
Dynamic user groups with rule-based membership and sync.
Generic custom fields — user fields, tenant fields, field groups, field types.
Data Subject Access Requests: GDPR exports, ICO compliance.
Batch user import: CSV upload, field mapping, preview, reupload.
Guided product walkthroughs using driver.js overlays.
Staff identity layer — internal users distinct from end users, with separate roles, audit scopes, and access patterns.
Platform plumbing
Third-party integration provider framework. OAuth clients, integration accounts, scoped configuration, webhooks.
Media file management and library. Uploads, collections, image processing, storage abstraction.
Messaging and notifications. Email, SMS, push, delivery channels, templates, queues.
Resource quotas and usage limits.
One framework, many adapters — the standard way packages accept inbound data (CSV, API pulls, file drops) with mapping, preview, and reupload.
The outbound mirror of imports — scheduled and on-demand exports to CSV, Excel, API, or file-drop destinations, with the same adapter pattern.
The working layer
Off-the-shelf business logic. Opinionated packages that run in production deployments today.
Fully configurable CRM for your application. Contacts, organisations, relationships, activity history, and CRM-specific reporting — wired into whichever workflow your product needs.
Payments, products, subscription management, Stripe integration.
Reporting engine with Excel and PDF export, scheduled reports.
Scheduling — entries, attendees, recurrence.
Fully customisable issue management system inside your platform — triage, routing, escalation, comments, and status workflows, all built in.
Competency tracking and management. Skills, qualifications, assessments.
Badge award system.
Lightweight to-do and checklist primitive other modules attach to — onboarding steps, issue actions, workflow items.
Threaded comments any module can attach to — issues, contacts, reports, records.
Visual workflow builder — triggers, conditions, actions, escalations, stitched over the message bus.
Recurring service contracts with SLA timers on issues — response and resolution windows, breach alerts, reporting.
Standard asset tracking — inventory, ownership, lifecycle, location, maintenance history.
Content, data capture, and tooling
Static CMS pages with draft/publish versioning.
Moodle LMS integration. Course sync, enrolment, grade sync.
Multi-page data capture forms with conditional logic.
User analytics and session tracking with GDPR compliance.
Testing utilities, seeders, scaffolding, and framework standards that keep every new service consistent with the rest of the fabric.
The AI gateway
AI capabilities — chat, sessions, agents, MCP server, token quotas. Provider-agnostic; routes to the models listed under AI providers.
Autonomous execution across the fabric
Software agents act on behalf of users and the platform. They coordinate through the message bus, reason with context, and escalate to humans on exception — humans handle exceptions, not happy paths.
Available now (three in general availability, one in beta)
Platform Agent
Acts as the user across the entire platform. Executes tasks, retrieves information and orchestrates workflows via HMAC-signed tool calls into Prism API.
Onboarding Agent
Guides account setup. Walks new users through tenant configuration, initial data, role assignments, and first-run workflows.
Welcome Agent
Greets users on first visit. Explains the environment, surfaces the right starting points, and hands off to the Onboarding Agent when setup begins.
Hive-Mind Agent Beta
Unlocks institutional knowledge trapped in data silos — Office 365, SharePoint, wikis, tickets, code repos — and exposes it securely to every agent in the fabric. Hybrid vector + keyword search via RRF, local embeddings through Ollama, nothing leaves your perimeter.
In development
Named, scoped and on the roadmap. Each closes a specific operational gap a platform team would otherwise staff. Each named roadmap agent follows the same route: scoped from a live client operational gap, shipped to our own production first, then generalised into the platform. Platform, Onboarding, Welcome and Hive-Mind Agents all came through this path.
Platform operations
SysOps Agent Roadmap
Knows the platform playbooks. Auto-heals common failures — certificate renewals, queue backpressure, disk thresholds, connection storms. Escalates to the on-call engineer when a runbook step needs human judgement.
BCDR Agent Roadmap
Continuous compliance and data-integrity checks against the ISO 27001 control map. Flags drift, raises evidence packages, and supports business continuity / disaster-recovery drills with scripted tabletop runs.
Policy Agent Roadmap
Real-time policy gate. Evaluates every event against the Organisation as Code policy set, allows by default, auto-remediates where scripted, escalates where not. The live enforcement arm of the compliance story; BCDR handles the evidence after the fact.
SecOps Agent Roadmap
Access anomaly detection, threat triage across audit logs, and incident coordination. Feeds incidents into the SysOps escalation chain and flags the BCDR Agent when a security event crosses into a continuity event.
Business operations
Support Agent Roadmap
Customer-facing, in-app help. Answers from the product's own documentation and account context, resolves common requests end-to-end, and hands off to a human when it can't.
Triage Agent Roadmap
Watches incoming jobs, issues, and messages. Classifies, prioritises, and routes to the right human — or the right agent — instead of everything landing in one shared inbox.
Reporting Agent Roadmap
Reads from microcelium-reporting and microcelium-analytics to answer plain-English business questions. Builds scheduled summaries, spots trend breaks, and drafts the weekly report so humans edit instead of author.
Custom agents & bring-your-own
Most clients need at least one agent we haven't yet built. There are two paths for this:
We build it with you
As part of a Managed Build or Advisory engagement, we scope, build, and deploy custom agents against your domain — the same path Platform, Onboarding, and Welcome Agents took into the platform. If the agent generalises, it graduates into the shipping catalogue. If it stays client-specific, it lives in your codebase and you own it outright.
Bring your own
Microcelium is an open fabric. Agents coordinate over MDXF envelopes on the message bus with HMAC-signed tool calls into Prism API. Any agent that can speak the envelope format runs alongside ours — on your infrastructure or inside the Cargo Server hierarchy. Reference implementations exist in Python, PHP, and JavaScript; full audit trail through Medusa regardless of origin.
Model-agnostic by design
microcelium-ai is the gateway. HMAC-signed tool calls, token-cost controls, interaction logging — plug in any provider through a consistent interface, from hosted APIs to local inference on your own GPU compute via Ollama or llama.cpp. Swap models without touching business logic.
OpenAI
Chat and completion, Whisper transcription, Realtime streaming for voice interfaces. Drives the Glass UI AI Assistant with turn pre-emption.
Anthropic
Claude models and MCP for tool-enabled agent integration. Lets Pandora ML services and external AI systems participate in the agentic fabric.
ElevenLabs
High-quality text-to-speech streamed back through the AI Assistant for natural Realtime audio responses.
Additional providers can be added to the gateway on request — the abstraction is model-agnostic. Local models run on your own GPU compute via Ollama or llama.cpp: same tool-calling and cost-control surface, inference stays in your perimeter.
Microcelium gives you the gateway. For the broader AI work Axisops builds on top of it — multi-model orchestration, extraction pipelines, reasoning systems, knowledge platforms — see axisops.com/ai.
Plugs into the systems you already use
Out-of-the-box connectors through microcelium-integrations, microcelium-payments, microcelium-messaging, the Accounts Gateway, and the Moodle package. All wired through the provider network and surfaced through Prism API.
Solid cards ship today. Dashed cards are vertical-specific integration roadmaps — target sets we'll ship alongside the matching use-case work.
Calendars
Google Calendar
Apple Calendar
Outlook Calendar
Payments
Stripe — subscriptions, one-off charges, customer portal- Apple In-App Purchase
Communications
Twilio — SMS and voice
WhatsApp- Email (SMTP/IMAP via the provider network)
Accounting
Xero
QuickBooks
Sage
FreeAgent
Learning
Moodle — course sync, enrolment, grade synchronisation
Legal case management Beta
Clio — matter, contact, and document sync via the Clio API, wired through microcelium-integrations.
Fintech Roadmap
- Open Banking: TrueLayer, GoCardless, Yapily
- KYC / AML: Onfido, ComplyAdvantage, Persona
- Payment rails: Adyen, Modulr, ClearBank
- Credit bureaux: Experian, Equifax
Legal & litigation Roadmap
- Case management: PracticeEvolve, Leap
- e-Signature: DocuSign, Adobe Sign
- e-Disclosure: Relativity
- Court e-filing (UK & US)
E-commerce Roadmap
- Storefronts: Shopify, WooCommerce
Manufacturing Roadmap
- Enterprise ERP: SAP S/4HANA, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Sage 200, NetSuite
- UK tax & filings: HMRC Making Tax Digital for VAT, Companies House
Supply chain & logistics Roadmap
- Order management & WMS: Linnworks, Brightpearl, Peoplevox, Mintsoft
- UK shipping carriers: Royal Mail, DPD, Evri, Parcelforce, Yodel, DHL, UPS
- Retail EDI: Tradacoms and EDIFACT retailer supplier portals
- HMRC customs: CDS declarations for cross-border movement
Extensible
Anything the provider network can reach — AMQP, MQTT, REST, MCP, SSH, SAMBA, Syncthing, Email. New integrations drop into microcelium-integrations as scoped providers.
What the interface library ships with
Glass UI is the batteries-included frontend for Prism API — React on the web, React Native (Expo) on mobile. Use it when you want a full SaaS surface out of the box; skip it when you're building headless or bringing your own UI. Ships with these feature sets out of the box.
Dashboard framework
- Real-time monitoring via WebSocket
- Interactive charts and data visualisation
- Alert management and notification centre
- Workflow visualisation — process flow monitoring and control
User management
- Role-based access control, granular permissions
- User impersonation within tenant
- Multi-tenant isolation
- Advanced session management and timeout
AI assistant integration
- Voice input with real-time transcription
- Streaming text and audio responses (OpenAI Realtime + ElevenLabs TTS)
- Tool execution via HMAC-signed function calls to Prism API
- Turn pre-emption — new prompts cancel previous audio streams
Feedback system
- In-app screenshot capture of current page
- Annotation tools for detailed feedback
- Direct integration with
microcelium-issuesticketing - Visual context preserved with every issue raised
Platform admin widgets
- Provider status and health
- Message Bus real-time message flow
- Service Engine start/stop/configure
- Web-based platform configuration
Native mobile
- iOS and Android via Expo
- PWA-capable web app for disconnected scenarios
- Offline progressive functionality
- Shared component model across web and mobile
Commodity engineering, eliminated
A SaaS build targeting enterprise or regulated markets — fintech, MSP, compliance, healthcare — writes all of the following before its first major customer. The shortcuts that work for generic consumer SaaS (Clerk, Stripe Payment Links, Vercel, Sentry) don't clear the bar. On Microcelium, you start day one with all of it in place.
- Multi-tenant auth + RBAC — 8–12 weeks
- User dashboard + portal — 4–6 weeks
- Subscription billing (Stripe, dunning, prorations, tax) — 5–8 weeks
- AI integration (multi-model, streaming, evals) — 6–10 weeks
- Content management — 3–5 weeks
- OAuth, SSO & social integrations — 4–6 weeks
- Reporting & analytics — 4–6 weeks
- Observability (Medusa stack — metrics, logs, traces, alerting) — 6–8 weeks
- Infrastructure & deployment (IaC, CI/CD, environments, secrets) — 6–10 weeks
Total: 46–71 weeks of commodity engineering — roughly a year of work before a line of business logic is written, and that's assuming a competent team and no surprises.
Got a vibe-coded prototype? We'll productionise it.
Bring the MVP you spun up with Cursor, Claude Code, v0, Lovable — whatever AI-assisted stack got you to a working demo. Our team maps your domain logic to existing Microcelium components (auth, billing, AI gateway, observability, deployment) and replaces the parts you'd otherwise have to harden yourself. You keep your product idea and the speed of iteration; you skip the year of commodity engineering, the security review your prototype won't pass, and the rewrite that happens the first time a real customer logs in.
On a typical engagement, your first product feature ships in week three, not week thirty.
Want the component surface mapped to your project?
Book an architectural briefing. We'll walk through which components apply, which you'd extend, and which you'd leave out.