feat: System status signaling — declare outages without taking site down

[tompscanlan]

Summary

We need a way to signal technical difficulty or maintenance to users without taking the whole site down. An admin/ops person should be able to set and clear a status message that appears in the platform UI.

Requirements

• Manual trigger (admin/ops initiated)
• Free-form message with severity level (info / warning / critical)
• Visible as a banner in the platform app (openmeet-platform)
• CLI/kubectl workflow to set and clear
• Must be fast to activate in an emergency

Suggested approach: ConfigMap + API endpoint

Simplest approach that leverages existing infrastructure:

1. ConfigMap — Store status message and severity in a Kubernetes ConfigMap (or a simple JSON file for non-k8s deployments)
2. API endpoint — GET /api/status returns the current status message (if any)
3. Platform polling — Frontend polls /api/status periodically (every 60s + on tab focus) and shows a banner when active

API

// GET /api/status
{
  "active": true,
  "severity": "warning",  // "info" | "warning" | "critical"
  "message": "We're experiencing intermittent issues with event publishing. Working on a fix.",
  "since": "2026-03-02T14:00:00Z"
}

Setting status

# Via ConfigMap (k8s)
kubectl create configmap system-status \
  --from-literal=active=true \
  --from-literal=severity=warning \
  --from-literal=message="Maintenance in progress" \
  -n prod --dry-run=client -o yaml | kubectl apply -f -

# Clear
kubectl delete configmap system-status -n prod

Platform UI

• Use Quasar's QBanner component
• Color by severity: blue (info), yellow (warning), red (critical)
• Dismissible but reappears on next poll if still active

Existing building blocks

• Platform already has a version polling system (10 min + tab focus events)
• Quasar Notify/Banner components available

Trade-offs

• ~60s propagation delay (ConfigMap volume mount refresh) — acceptable for most scenarios
• For instant propagation, could use Redis pub/sub or a direct API write endpoint instead of ConfigMap