One Hub or Many? Choosing Your AI Architecture

Enterprise AI deployment isn’t one-size-fits-all. Some organizations need centralized control. Others need distributed autonomy. Many need both.

Calliope supports multiple deployment topologies to match how your organization actually works.

Topology Options

Single Centralized Hub: One Calliope instance serves the entire organization.

Multiple Distributed Hubs: Separate instances per team, region, or business unit.

Hub and Spoke: Central hub with peered satellite deployments.

Federated: Independent hubs with shared governance.

Single Centralized Hub

[All Users]
     ↓
[Central Calliope Hub]
     ↓
[All Data Sources]

Best for:

• Smaller organizations
• Uniform compliance requirements
• Centralized IT operations
• Single geographic region

Advantages:

• Simplest to manage
• Consistent policies everywhere
• Single point of governance
• Unified audit trail
• Lower infrastructure cost

Considerations:

• Single point of failure
• Latency for distant users
• All data flows through one location
• May not meet data residency requirements

Multiple Distributed Hubs

[Team A Users] → [Team A Hub] → [Team A Data]

[Team B Users] → [Team B Hub] → [Team B Data]

[Region X Users] → [Region X Hub] → [Region X Data]

Best for:

• Large enterprises with autonomous business units
• Strict data residency requirements
• Air-gapped or isolated networks
• Teams with very different requirements

Advantages:

• Data stays local to each unit
• Independent scaling per hub
• Failure isolation
• Can meet varied compliance requirements
• Low latency for local users

Considerations:

• More infrastructure to manage
• Policies must be coordinated manually
• No unified view across organization
• Higher total cost

Hub and Spoke (Peered)

              [Central Hub]
             /      |      \
            /       |       \
    [Spoke A]   [Spoke B]   [Spoke C]
        ↓           ↓           ↓
   [Local Users] [Local Users] [Local Users]

Best for:

• Global organizations with regional presence
• Central governance with local execution
• Data residency with unified management
• Mixed cloud and on-premise

Advantages:

• Central policy management
• Local data processing
• Unified governance, distributed execution
• Flexible scaling per spoke
• Reduced latency for regional users

How it works:

• Central hub defines policies, manages governance
• Spokes inherit policies, process locally
• Data stays in spoke region
• Audit aggregates to central (or stays local)
• Users connect to nearest spoke

Federated Model

[Hub A] ←——→ [Hub B] ←——→ [Hub C]
   ↓              ↓              ↓
[Users A]    [Users B]     [Users C]

Best for:

• Mergers and acquisitions
• Partner ecosystems
• Highly autonomous divisions
• Consortiums

Advantages:

• Full autonomy per hub
• Selective sharing between hubs
• Can evolve independently
• Supports complex organizational structures

Considerations:

• Most complex to coordinate
• Policy alignment requires governance process
• Cross-hub workflows need explicit configuration

Choosing Your Topology

Ask these questions:

Common Patterns

By Region:

• Hub per geography (Americas, EMEA, APAC)
• Data stays in region
• Central governance coordination

By Business Unit:

• Hub per division
• Independent budgets and policies
• Shared platform standards

By Network:

• Hub per network zone
• Corporate, production, air-gapped
• Security boundary alignment

By Compliance:

• Hub per compliance regime
• HIPAA environment separate from general
• PCI environment isolated

Migration Paths

Start simple, grow as needed:

Phase 1: Single centralized hub Phase 2: Add regional spokes as you expand Phase 3: Federate for acquisitions or partners

Or:

Phase 1: Hub per business unit (distributed) Phase 2: Add central governance layer Phase 3: Full hub-and-spoke with policy inheritance

Governance Across Topologies

Centralized: Single policy set, simple Distributed: Independent policies per hub Hub and Spoke: Central policies inherited by spokes, local customization allowed Federated: Shared policy frameworks, independent enforcement

Zentinelle supports policy inheritance and coordination across topologies.

Infrastructure Considerations

The Topology Decision Checklist

Choosing your deployment topology:

• Where are users located?
• Where must data reside?
• How autonomous are business units?
• What are the compliance boundaries?
• What’s the IT management capacity?
• What’s the budget for infrastructure?
• How might this evolve over time?

The right topology matches your organization, not a vendor’s preference.

Discuss deployment topology with our team →