Architecture

Zango is six layers stacked bottom-up. Each layer depends on the ones beneath it and hands the layers above a guarantee they no longer have to implement. The practical upshot: you build features at the top, and tenancy, security, lifecycle, and observability are already taken care of underneath.

AI Module

Providers, prompts, tools, agents, memory, and cost tracking. Inherits tenancy, permissions, and audit from every layer below, so agents act on real data safely.

L06

Experience

The AppBuilder React shell, CRUD list and form screens, and custom pages. Routes, menus, and theme are served at runtime, so the UI changes without a rebuild.

L05

Business Logic

Workflows model the record lifecycle (statuses, role-gated transitions, done methods), with async tasks and events handling everything in the background.

L04

Access & Security

Default-deny policies, custom roles, and built-in OTP, MFA, SAML, and OAuth. Every access and change is audit-logged for compliance.

L03

Data

Modules of tenant-scoped models on DynamicModelBase, related with ZForeignKey. Dynamic Data Models let tenants diverge on fields while sharing one class.

L02

Infrastructure

Schema-per-tenant multi-tenancy, the Platform Panel, encrypted secrets, and release fixtures for promoting configuration between environments.

L01

How to read the stack

Start at the bottom. Infrastructure makes the deployment multi-tenant, so Data can be isolated per tenant without any filtering code. With isolated data, Access & Security can gate every view by default and audit every change. On top of secure data, Business Logic can model real record lifecycles, and the Experience layer renders them as screens that reconfigure at runtime. The AI Module sits at the very top precisely because everything beneath it is complete: an agent inherits the right tenant, the right permissions, the workflow history, and the audit trail automatically.

That ordering is the whole point. The AI module is powerful not because it is a clever wrapper around a model, but because it stands on a finished platform. See the AI Module for how that plays out in practice.

Two things that cut across every layer

A couple of pieces are not a single layer; they touch all of them:

• Packages (AppBuilder, CRUD, Workflow, Communication) supply the building blocks layers use, installed once per app. See the Package Ecosystem.
• The App Panel is the operations surface for the whole stack: users, roles, policies, auth, secrets, logs, routes, and AI agents. See the App Panel Reference.

You rarely assemble these layers by hand. The zango-app-developer plugin generates the code at each layer in the correct order from a plain-English description; this page is the map so you know what it is building and why.