App-tier manifests, rendered from catalog/*.yaml ServiceDefinitions by catalog/render.py and split into dependency-ordered waves (wave-<N>/).

Each wave-<N>/ is reconciled by its own Flux Kustomization apps-wave-<N> (clusters/base/apps-wave-<N>.yaml), which dependsOn wave N-1 (wave 0 dependsOn platform-config) and health-gates (wait: true) ONLY that wave. A crashlooping workload in a later wave can no longer stall an earlier wave or block new revisions.
wave-<N>/kustomization.yaml and clusters/base/apps-wave-<N>.yaml are generated — run python3 catalog/render.py --emit-waves after onboarding a service; do not hand-edit them.
Wave assignment = longest dependency-path depth over the catalog dependencies: graph; a co-located CNPG database <svc>-db is a leaf and always lands strictly below its consumer.

See ../DESIGN-waves.md for the wave table, Flux topology, and the cutover runbook.