The edge gateway is a dedicated on-site runtime installed alongside the building's network infrastructure. It carries a copy of the behavioral specification, the workflow definitions, the permissions model, and a recent snapshot of resident and guest identity. Its purpose is narrow and specific: keep the building behaving correctly when the link to the cloud drops.

What continues locally during an outage. Access decisions execute against the local permissions model. Door controllers, locks, and readers receive the same orchestrated decisions they would receive online. Critical notifications fire through any channel that does not depend on the cloud — the intercom system, on-site staff radios, and unit-side panels. Resident apps fall back to cached state with a clear offline indicator.

What pauses. Cross-building portfolio operations pause. Delayed-channel notifications (email, batched summaries) queue locally. Long-running workflows continue from their last persisted step when the link returns.

Reconciliation. When connectivity returns, the gateway and cloud reconcile state through versioned event logs. Conflicts that are not auto-resolvable are surfaced to staff for review before they affect the resident experience. The gateway never silently reverts a decision that has already been communicated.

Hardware footprint. A small fanless server in the building's IT closet, sized for the building. Network segmentation isolates it from resident-facing systems. Owner-supplied and owner-replaceable.

The edge gateway is the reason the operating layer can be called infrastructure rather than software-as-a-service. Residents do not experience the cloud — they experience the building. The gateway makes that contract enforceable.