Tier: Bulk Window

What this is

The weekly-cadence tier for large payloads. Cadence: weekly (or monthly close cycles, period-end attestations). Payload: MB to GB. Used for catalog refreshes, vendor master sync, weekly assortment imports, EDI 810 invoice batches, period-end exports, and Bitcoin L2 hash anchoring. Distinct from daily-batch by payload size and schedule cadence — bulk-window is the missing fourth adapter pattern in the original Endpoint Library.

Purpose

Some operations are inherently periodic and inherently large. A retailer's weekly Item File. A vendor's EDI 810 invoice batch. An hourly Bitcoin L2 commit. Daily-batch is too frequent; reference is too slow. Bulk-window is the right slot — "scheduled, large, takes time to process."

Structure

Property	Value
Cadence	weekly, monthly close, period-end
Payload size	MB–GB
Protocol fit	scheduled SFTP drop, signed S3 URL, paged REST/GraphQL export, EDI
Failure metric	"didn't land in window" / "row count off vs manifest"
Health input	last window completion timestamp
Recovery primitive	reschedule the window (or run partial with manual oversight)
Alert pattern	window-missed
Cache strategy	invalidate at window close
Required SLA fields	`window_start`, `window_end` (cron strings)
Forbidden SLA fields	`freshness_budget`, `max_lag`, `schedule`, `ttl`
Required recovery	`mode: reschedule-window`
Watcher check interval	1 hour

Health states

green:  window completed within window range
amber:  window started but not completed within range
red:    window slot missed entirely

Examples

POST /imports/items — weekly catalog drop (Adapter axis)
POST /imports/customers — customer master refresh
POST /imports/employees — HRIS roster sync
POST /imports/regulatory-zones — quarterly compliance sweep
POST /exports/transactions — period transaction export
POST /blockchain-anchor/commit — hourly/daily Bitcoin L2 batch hash commit
EDI 810 invoice batches via canary-commercial

Consumers

POS adapters refreshing catalog from merchant ERP
BI tools running monthly close
Compliance attestations
Vendor accounting systems
Bitcoin L2 anchoring (cost economics enforce bulk window — per-event L2 is cost-prohibitive)

Why this tier was missing

The original Endpoint Library listed three adapter patterns (webhook receiver / polling client / edge-agent push) without naming them as tier expressions. The fourth pattern — bulk-window inbound — was structurally absent. Catalog refreshes, weekly imports, and reference-master sync had no canonical home. The Ross 2011 RTI architecture had it (DDS-staged file transfers over HTTPS streams with explicit landing-window monitoring); Canary's variant is cloud-native SFTP/bucket landing zones with the same lifecycle semantics. Adding bulk-window closes the largest tier gap.

Anti-pattern

Don't degrade bulk-window to daily-batch for "simplicity." Catalog refresh that takes hours to process becomes a daily-batch slot that runs over its window; that breaks the schedule contract for everything else in the daily slot.