A bento box is not a size.
It is the box, not what is in it. That sounds like a quibble until you try to answer “how many rolls is a bento box?” — which is the same question as how many things are in a shipping container.
- Roll1
- One service. Ollama is a roll. Postgres is a roll. Ninety-two of them, in twelve families.
- Combo2–4 rolls
- A small composition that solves one problem. Two is the floor because a combination of one thing is not a combination.
- Platter5+ rolls
- A complete deployment scenario. The largest is twenty-nine rolls.
That is the whole ladder, and it is counted on rolls. Nothing else is a size.
A bento box
A form, not a tier. Any composition can become one.
A standardised, stackable box with typed compartments — each shaped for what belongs in it, each independently full or empty, none able to leak into another — so that the box ships as one thing while its contents remain many things.
A combo can ship as a bento box. So can a platter. What makes something a bento box is that it has been sealed for delivery — one artifact you can hand over, deploy, and hold to a version — not how much is inside it.
A jubako
Two or more bento boxes, stacked in order.
The bottom box might be data and networking. The one above it might be documents and search. Put them together and you have a solution rather than a component — and adding a third makes the stack bigger, not the boxes.
Not thirteen. Both boxes need an edge and container metrics, so they share two rolls and you deploy them once. That saving is the reason to stack rather than to run two deployments side by side.
You will not find bento boxes as a category on the Menu, and that is deliberate. The Menu lists compositions by what they do and how big they are; the box is how any of them arrives. A filter for it would be a filter for the packaging on everything.