Files
orca/cloud
Jinwoo Hong 71e308e574 feat(relay): count failed cell-inventory lock acquisitions (#21067)
* feat(relay): count failed cell-inventory lock acquisitions

The cell inventory lock is taken NOWAIT, so contention errors with 55P03 and
retries instead of waiting. CellInventoryHoldSamples.record only runs after a
successful acquisition, so the hold metrics were structurally blind to the
dominant failure mode: production showed ~65 failed fleet-wide acquisitions per
minute while cellInventoryHoldMsMax read a benign 53ms mean.

Count failures next to the holds and publish them as cellInventoryLockUnavailable
in orca_relay_runtime_metrics. Drained on both the commit and the rollback path,
since a 55P03 rolls its transaction back.

* fix(relay): separate request-path lock timeouts from sweep deferrals

Review caught that the first counter only incremented under failIfUnavailable,
which is the sweep mode. Background sweeps take the inventory NOWAIT and
re-derive a skipped candidate next tick, so those deferrals are by design and
already reported as orca_relay_sweep_cell_inventory_busy. The request path uses
a bounded lock_timeout instead, whose expiry raises the same 55P03 without
NOWAIT and was not counted at all -- so the metric measured only the benign
population and missed the user-visible one.

Split them: cellInventoryLockUnavailable for NOWAIT deferrals,
cellInventoryLockTimeouts for expired bounded waits. Production over 30 minutes
shows why the distinction matters -- roughly 1,200 fleet-wide sweep deferrals
against roughly 10/min request-path timeouts.

Adds transaction-path coverage for both drains, which were previously unpinned.
Timeouts count per attempt, not per request, since 55P03 is retryable.

* fix(relay): publish the cell-inventory lock metrics to Cloud Monitoring

google_logging_metric.relay_snapshot only creates metrics for fields listed in
relay_runtime_metrics, and the cellInventoryHold* fields were never added when
the hold telemetry landed. They have been log-only since, so nothing could
alert on the lock and the contention stayed invisible in exactly the way the
telemetry was meant to prevent.

Maps the three hold fields and both new failure counters.

Also corrects the field comment: the split is by wait policy, not by caller.
assignOnce takes the inventory fail-fast on its first placement attempt, so
request-reachable sites land in cellInventoryLockUnavailable too; that lane
reads as contention pressure, and the expired bounded wait is the stall lane.
2026-09-16 14:50:34 -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.