Files
orca/cloud
Jinwoo Hong e72044a936 fix(relay): a lost database reply ends its connection within statement timeout + 10 s (#26829)
* fix(relay): a lost database reply ends its connection within statement timeout + 2 s

The request pool sets query_timeout to the statement timeout plus 2 s. A
read timeout poisons its transaction: later statements fail at once,
COMMIT never runs (even when the operation caught the error), no ROLLBACK
queues behind the dead statement, and the client is released with the
error so pg-pool destroys it. Autocommit statements destroy their client
too. The server bounds an orphaned idle backend with idle_session_timeout
30 s. A read timeout is answered 503 and never retried, and a renewal
batch that loses its reply fails whole instead of fanning out.

* fix(relay): read timeout margin 10 s, configurable, so routine 5-7 s database stalls never trip it

A whole-VM stall delays replies the server already timed. With a 2 s
margin the read timeout fired inside routine stalls, destroying healthy
clients and failing requests that succeed today. The margin is now 10 s
(ORCA_RELAY_POSTGRES_READ_TIMEOUT_MARGIN_MS), and a real-server test holds
a reply 6.5 s and requires it delivered on the same connection. The fix
level rises to 2 here, with the lost-reply fix.

* docs(relay): name the startup retry that can see a read timeout, and why it is safe

Boot open retries only an unreachable database. The director's startup
cell reconcile does retry a lost reply, which is safe: it re-runs upserts
and limit-change deletes that converge on the same rows.

* fix(relay): answer 503, not 500, when Postgres ends the session mid-request

Staging B1: pg_terminate_backend during /v1/assign returned 500 29 times.
57P01/57P02 and 08000/08003 join the transient SQLSTATEs; pg's
'Connection terminated' and ECONNRESET count only when the database layer
threw them. transaction() still never retries them.

* fix(relay): answer 503 when the pool acquire fails on a dead socket

Staging B1 re-test: a Cloud SQL restart failed PostgresDatabase.transaction's
acquire with 'write EPIPE', answered 500. An acquire failure with EPIPE,
ECONNRESET, ECONNREFUSED, ETIMEDOUT or EHOSTUNREACH is now a pool connect
failure (no statement ran), and acquire failures count as database-layer
errors. EPIPE mid-statement is treated like ECONNRESET.
2026-10-09 18:00:10 -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.