Files
orca/cloud
Jinwoo Hong 7c119465b0 fix(relay): define restart-safe by the cell runtime, and refuse waves without headroom (#24259)
* fix(relay): let a same-cap drain finish when only unplaceable hosts remain

The c28 canary on 2026-10-01 drained the cell to zero live connections, but four
hosts with no free slot anywhere kept redialling and held director leases on it,
so the restart-safe wait timed out and left the cell isolated and empty.

The drain wait now also passes once the runtime has carried nothing for a
sustained quiet window while a small, capped number of leases remain, and logs
the escape. Apply modes also refuse a cell whose hosts exceed 80% of the free
slots on the other general cells, so a wave cannot strand hosts in the first place.

Claude-Session: ced32ebb-7155-4413-adad-1eccd14c2010

* fix(relay): define restart-safe by the cell runtime, not director leases

Replaces the opt-in stranded-host escape with a corrected definition. A
restart is safe when the cell runtime carries nothing live and no migration
is open, sustained for the drain pace window. Director activity leases lag
hosts that already left or cannot be placed, so they are reported in a
progress line and the verified result instead of blocking the restart.

The same-cap drain passes its existing pace window. The headroom script is
added to the trusted evidence code paths with the other production scripts.

Claude-Session: ced32ebb-7155-4413-adad-1eccd14c2010

* fix(relay): print stranded director counts on every restart-safe sample

Each restart-safe poll now prints its sample count and the director's
restart-blocking leases, request units, reserved remainder, and migrations
under `stranded`; the verified line carries the same object. Open migrations
still block because each is pinned to the cell incarnation a restart replaces.

Claude-Session: ced32ebb-7155-4413-adad-1eccd14c2010

* fix(relay): require the pace window for every live restart-safe wait

Pre-auth and total connections no longer reset the restart-safe window:
on drained c28 they flickered with unauthenticated redials in a third of
samples, which a restart does not lose. They stay in the progress output.

Every live restart-safe call must now pass --pace-window-ms. The capacity
job and staging proof drain unpaced, so they pass the production 300000 ms
window, and the calls that relied on the 180000 ms default get 480000 ms.

Headroom free slots now follow the director's placement rule: the admission
pause minus the larger of observed and enforced units, minus outstanding
control reservations.

Claude-Session: ced32ebb-7155-4413-adad-1eccd14c2010
2026-09-30 22:25:36 -04:00
..

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 on ORCA_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 behind pnpm ops:relay, pnpm incident:relay, and pnpm incident:relay-preflight.
  • apps/push and packages/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 and environments/ the tfvars. Drive it through pnpm infra:init, pnpm infra:plan, and pnpm 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 with pnpm test.
  • dev/contracts and dev/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 in docs/relay-workflows.md, and the push gateway runbook in docs/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.