Idea: Praxis-Forge allow stacks to be executed concurrently

[crstrn13]

Summary

Allow independent stacks to be applied concurrently during forge up / forge stack apply, reducing wall-clock time for environments with multiple non-dependent stacks.

Motivation

Forge applies stacks sequentially — each stack must complete before the next begins (src/stack/mod.rs:127-141). In a typical multi-stack environment like:

clusters:
  - name: west
    stacks: [metallb, operator, site, gateway]

stacks metallb and operator may be fully independent, yet operator waits for metallb to finish before it can start. As the number of stacks grows, the cumulative wait becomes significant.

Parallelising independent stacks would reduce total apply time to the length of the critical path rather than the sum of all stacks.

Current behaviour

• Stacks are applied in list order via a sequential for loop (apply_stacks in src/stack/mod.rs).
• Steps within each stack are sequential (execute_steps in src/stack/engine.rs:230-243).
• The entire codebase is synchronous — no async runtime, no threading (README: "synchronous CLI with no async runtime").
• State is written under a file lock after all stacks complete.

Proposed solution

Introduce an opt-in mechanism for declaring parallelisable stacks, and a runtime that can execute them concurrently.

Configuration surface

A possible approach: allow grouping stacks into parallel batches in the cluster's stacks list. For example:

clusters:
  - name: west
    stacks:
      - parallel: [metallb, operator]   # run concurrently
      - site                            # after both finish
      - gateway                         # after site

Or alternatively, a dependency DAG:

stacks:
  metallb:
    steps: [...]
  operator:
    steps: [...]
  site:
    dependsOn: [metallb, operator]
    steps: [...]
  gateway:
    dependsOn: [site]
    steps: [...]

Both approaches preserve backwards compatibility — existing flat stacks: [a, b, c] lists continue to mean sequential.

Runtime changes

• Introduce a thread pool (e.g. std::thread::scope or rayon) or an async runtime (e.g. tokio) to run parallel stacks.
• State updates must be synchronised: either per-stack locking, or collect results and write state after a parallel batch completes.
• Error handling: if one stack in a parallel group fails, the others in that group should either be cancelled or allowed to finish (user-configurable or opinionated default — to be decided).
• Capture steps that produce values consumed by a later stack create an implicit dependency that should be validated at plan time.

Steps within a stack

Step-level parallelism is out of scope for this issue. Steps within a single stack remain sequential — their ordering is meaningful.

Acceptance criteria

• Config schema supports declaring parallel stack groups (backwards-compatible with the current flat list)
• Schema validation rejects cycles and missing dependencies
• Parallel stacks execute concurrently, reducing wall-clock time
• State file is updated correctly for each stack (no data races)
• A failing stack in a parallel group does not corrupt state for other stacks
• Capture cross-stack dependencies are validated at plan time
• forge status correctly reports per-stack state for parallel runs
• Existing sequential configs continue to work without changes

Alternatives considered

• Intra-step parallelism only (e.g. parallel Helm installs within a stack): more granular but harder to reason about, and the user-facing benefit is smaller since most stacks are short.
• External orchestration (e.g. make -j): avoids in-tool complexity but loses state tracking, error handling, and the single-config-file ergonomics.

Additional context

PR instructions

The PR description should include:

• How to review the changes (areas of interest and suggested review order)
• Steps showing how to manually confirm the feature works locally (e.g. create a forge.yaml with parallel stacks, run forge up, observe concurrent output and correct state)

The issue was already created at praxis-proxy/forge#13 — I just couldn't add it to the Kuadrant project before you stopped me. You can add it to the project manually if needed.