* fix(relay): re-place hosts off a cell isolated for a roll A roll isolates a cell by moving it out of the 'general' admission class; the cell then refuses every attach with 4503. The director never noticed, because the only liveness test it applies to a host's current cell reads `relay_cell_runtime.ready` and the heartbeat, and an isolated cell keeps heartbeating ready=1 for the whole drain. So every host on that cell was handed its own dead cell, closed, and handed it back — 500-1,900 hosts looping for 13-16 minutes per cell roll, at ~6 dials each per minute, with no neighbour absorbing anything. The sticky lane now treats a live incumbent whose admission is 'migration-only' — the state a roll's isolate step writes — the same way it treats a dead one: it returns null, which means "fall through to placement". The placement lane had the identical hole eleven lines further down, so it takes the same predicate; without that second swap the sticky change is inert, because placement would hand the pin straight back (a draining cell has more headroom than anyone). An isolated incumbent skips the dead-cell fence branch: that branch exists to prove an unreachable cell stopped serving a host, and this one is reachable and enforces the epoch itself. 'existing-only' is deliberately untouched — those cells serve the hosts they already hold, and only `assignmentStrandedOnUnservedCell` may release that pin. A host with an open `relay_assignment_migrations` row keeps its pin too, so this stays disjoint from the migration machinery. Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01JNnE9qzUZMMnqpZWCqM3nb * fix(relay): gate re-placement on a roll-isolation marker, not on admission Review of the first commit found the predicate wrong. `migration-only` is an admission class, not a drain signal: an Asia `--mode rollback`, an evacuation or forward-recovery target awaiting a separate promote dispatch, a failed same-cap wave's re-isolate, an abandoned migration retired on its target and a rehome settlement all park loaded cells there durably, with no migration lease and no open migration row. All five were indistinguishable from a roll's isolate, so the first commit would have converted `operate-relay-asia-admission --mode rollback` from a reversible admission flip into a mass move of ~4,000 hosts — and, because `leastLoadedCell` treated region as a preference, into us-central1. The signal is now an explicit stamp. `relay_cell_admission` gains a nullable `roll_isolated_at`, added through the shared schema runner's catalog pre-check so a migrated database takes no relation lock on boot and an un-migrated one gets a catalog-only rewrite. The same-cap isolate step is its only writer, via a new optional `rollIsolatedCells` on the selector apply; the same UPDATE that writes the state clears the stamp whenever a cell leaves 'migration-only', so a restore cannot leave one behind and a failed wave's re-isolate keeps the one it has. Every other admission writer omits the field, so its cells stay unmarked and their hosts stay pinned. Old directors ignore the field; old callers never send it. Region is now a constraint rather than a preference on this path only: a re-placement must find a general, live cell with connection headroom in the host's own region, or the pin is kept and one `orca_relay_sticky_replacement_deferred` event is logged. Cross-region spill is no longer reachable here. The fence bypass is narrowed to a live incumbent. It was always a no-op for the intended case, and for a stamped cell that stops heartbeating while still holding sockets it reopened split-brain; that cell now takes the dead-cell path unchanged. Also: the hot-path admission reader no longer throws on an unrecognised state — it sits on every sticky dial and the rule it feeds is "move the host", so an unreadable row has to mean "don't". And the sticky lane reads the admission row once for both the stranded rule and the stamp instead of twice. Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01JNnE9qzUZMMnqpZWCqM3nb * fix(relay): emit the re-placement events after the transaction commits CodeRabbit on assignment-store.ts:1075. Both events were written where they are decided, which is inside assignOnce's transaction. A reservation or lease write failing after that point rolls the placement back, but a line already on stdout cannot be rolled back with it — so the canary this PR asks an operator to read would count re-placements that never happened, and a Postgres transaction retry could leave a stale line behind as well. The transaction now returns its events alongside the RelayAssignment and the caller flushes them once it has resolved. Returning them rather than setting a variable in the enclosing scope is what makes the retry case safe too: only the attempt that committed can carry its events out. assign()'s signature is unchanged; the extra shape lives entirely inside assignOnce. orca_relay_sticky_replacement_deferred was moved the same way. It cost one more push into the array that already existed, and it is decided inside the same transaction, so leaving it behind would have been the odd case rather than the cheap one. The new test injects a failure on the first write after the decision, asserts no event is emitted, and asserts the assignment is still on its original cell — without that second assertion the absence would only prove the emit was early, not that it would have been wrong. A control dial with nothing injected emits exactly one event, so the case cannot pass on a broken harness. With the emit put back inside the transaction, it fails. Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01JNnE9qzUZMMnqpZWCqM3nb * fix(relay): expire the roll stamp, correct the wire note, assert the stamp landed Delta review findings B, D and E. A (the deferral path's cost) is deliberately not implemented; it is now written up under Follow-ups in the PR body as required before any Asia roll, because it cannot fire in a US canary. B, which also closes C: the stamp was written, carried and never compared to anything. A roll isolates and restores one cell inside ~15 minutes, so a stamp older than two hours is not a roll in progress. It is a failed wave whose failsafe re-isolated a possibly healthy cell and is waiting on an operator — the postmortem in this tree records gaps of hours — or an orphan left by a director rollback whose restore wrote 'general' without the clause that clears the stamp, which the selector's 'keep' branch would then preserve until some later park reactivated it. Both want the same answer and it is the pre-existing one: keep the pin. One comparison against a value already on the row. The bound takes the caller's `now` rather than reading the clock again, so one assign reasons about one instant; the stamp's age is now a thing that decides whether a host moves, and two clock reads could disagree across it. D: the comment beside the new request field claimed an updated caller reaching an older director "is simply ignored". The schema is .strict(), so it is a 400. That fails closed — the isolate aborts before MUTATION_STARTED is set and nothing is written — but it is a deploy ordering constraint, and it was undocumented. The comment now says so and the PR body's rollout notes carry it. E: nothing read the `rollIsolated` the script already prints, so an older script against a newer director would silently produce today's behaviour and the canary would read as "the fix did nothing" with no way to tell that from a wrong premise. Both isolate steps now assert it, beside the generation they already parse. Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01JNnE9qzUZMMnqpZWCqM3nb
Orca Relay
The relay that connects the Orca mobile app to a desktop host. Phones and desktops never talk to each other directly: each opens an outbound WebSocket to a relay cell, the relay pairs the two sessions, and it splices frames between them. A director assigns hosts to cells and coordinates migrations; cells carry the user connections.
This directory is an independent pnpm workspace inside the Orca monorepo. Run
its commands from cloud/, not the repository root. The source is covered by
the repository's root MIT license.
Packages
packages/relay-contract: the wire contract shared by the relay, the desktop app, and the mobile app (frame shapes, close codes, admission budgets, splice state machine).apps/relay: the relay server. The same image runs as a director or a cell depending onORCA_RELAY_ROLE.apps/relay-fence-broker: a private, IAM-only service that owns the durable mutation lease, the Terraform checkout, and the narrow Compute mutation used when a registered target is superseded. The workflow that calls it holds read and invoke rights only, never those mutation permissions.apps/relay-ops: the relay operations console and the incident monitor behindpnpm ops:relay,pnpm incident:relay, andpnpm incident:relay-preflight.apps/pushandpackages/push-contract: the mobile push gateway that holds the APNs key and sends to phones through APNs and FCM, and its wire contract. It is deployed and operated from here but is not part of the relay data path; see docs/push-gateway.md.
Mobile push gateway
apps/push is a separate Cloud Run service from the relay. Phones never hold an
Orca credential for it: the desktop host authenticates with the same X25519
key it uses for the relay, answering an encrypted challenge to mint a 24 hour
session, then registers each paired phone's native push token and asks the
gateway to push. The gateway queues each event as its own notification,
enforces per-host quotas and request limits, and retires a
registration as soon as Apple or Google reports the token unregistered.
Provider push is the only ordinary mobile OS-banner path. The notification
socket is retained only for live dismissal and reconnect tray reconciliation;
it never creates or recovers banners. Desktop notification categories remain
authoritative.
Each delivery is persisted as one notification event. Before deploying an
incompatible queue format, stop all older push gateway revisions and clear only
unpublished push delivery fixtures; no queue preservation or migration is required.
FCM notification messages are inherently collapsible while offline and have a
small concurrent collapse-key budget, so every pending alert is not guaranteed.
Storage follows the relay pattern: PostgreSQL in production, SQLite for tests
and local development. Configure it with ORCA_PUSH_PUBLIC_URL, ORCA_PUSH_FCM_PROJECT_ID,
ORCA_PUSH_DATABASE_URL, the three APNs variables (ORCA_PUSH_APNS_KEY,
ORCA_PUSH_APNS_KEY_ID, ORCA_PUSH_APPLE_TEAM_ID, all three or none), and
optionally ORCA_PUSH_APNS_TOPIC. The FCM credential comes from
the runtime service account, so no key material is configured for Android. See
push gateway operations for deployment and recovery.
Logging is aggregate counters only. Tokens, notification titles, notification bodies, and full host fingerprints never reach a log line.
Infrastructure and operations
infra/terraform: the relay Terraform root. It owns the cells, the director, the shared Cloud SQL instance, DNS, observability, and every GitHub Workload Identity provider the relay workflows authenticate through.backend/holds the per-environment backend configuration andenvironments/the tfvars. Drive it throughpnpm infra:init,pnpm infra:plan, andpnpm infra:apply.dev/scripts: the deploy, capacity, admission, rehome, monitoring, and load scripts the workflows call, plus the contract tests that pin each workflow and Terraform surface. Run them withpnpm test.dev/contractsanddev/fixtures: the checked-in data those contract tests read, including the Terraform root partition.docs/: the relay runbooks, capacity-testing guide, incident-monitor reference, the workflow variable reference indocs/relay-workflows.md, and the push gateway runbook indocs/push-gateway.md.
Workflows
The 25 .github/workflows/cloud-*.yml workflows are the deploy and operate
surface: publish and deploy the director, roll GCE cell capacity, operate Asia
admission and regional rehoming, prove staging capacity, monitor production,
power staging up and down, and deploy the mobile push gateway.
.github/actions/cloud-sql-rollout-lease is the compare-and-swap lease that
serializes rollouts against the shared Cloud SQL instance. Push reuses that
action with its own lease object and deployment concurrency group.
Every one of them is inert. Each top-level job is gated on
vars.ORCA_CLOUD_OPERATIONS_ENABLED == 'true', a repository variable that is
unset here, so the two scheduled triggers and every manual dispatch skip
without running a step. Only the repository owner, holding the GCP identities
these workflows authenticate as, can turn them on.
Cloud Verify is not gated. It builds, typechecks, lints, tests, secret-scans,
and validates the relay Terraform on every change under cloud/, and it runs
on fork pull requests, so it configures no backend and holds no credential.
What is not here
The terraform-foundation and terraform-apps roots and the API and auth
services live in the private stablyai/orca-cloud repository. Scripts and
tests that spanned both trees were narrowed to the relay side rather than
carrying a dangling reference.
Local development
cd cloud
pnpm install
pnpm build
pnpm test
pnpm test runs the SQLite-backed suites. Tests that need PostgreSQL run only
when ORCA_RELAY_TEST_POSTGRES_URL points at a disposable PostgreSQL 16 or 17
database, for example:
docker run --rm -d --name orca-relay-pg -e POSTGRES_HOST_AUTH_METHOD=trust \
-e POSTGRES_DB=orca_relay_test -p 55440:5432 postgres:16-alpine
ORCA_RELAY_TEST_POSTGRES_URL=postgres://postgres@127.0.0.1:55440/orca_relay_test \
pnpm --filter @orca-cloud/relay test
docker rm -f orca-relay-pg
Configuration is read from environment variables validated in
apps/relay/src/config.ts. ORCA_RELAY_ASSIGNMENT_SIGNING_KEY (at least 32
bytes) is the only required value; everything else has a local default.