* fix(relay): rehome hosts to their preferred region in either direction The regional-rehome worker only moved hosts from a us-central1 cell to an asia-east2 one, so a host whose desktop later records us-central1 stays where it was put. Rehoming now compares the fresh preference against the region of the cell the host is on and moves it to a general cell in the preferred region either way, through the same drain, migrate, safety, and rate-limit machinery. - relay_region_rehome_attempts.preferred_region accepts both regions; existing databases are upgraded in place by an idempotent named-constraint swap that is safe when several directors start at once. - A target must carry the drain protocol too: moving a host onto a cell it can never be drained off again is the trap this change exists to undo. The fleet whose health gates a rehome is now every general drainable cell, which is exactly the set of legal sources and targets. - The trust probe accepts a source cell in any region. No wire change, and no behaviour change while the durable control is off. * fix(relay): bound bidirectional rehoming with a per-host cooldown Moving hosts in both directions removed the property that made the old one-way worker self-terminating: a desktop whose region probe flips would be dragged back and forth, one full drain and migrate per flip, because the preference age never expires while the host keeps reconnecting. - relay_region_rehome_control gains host_cooldown_ms, an operator input plumbed like preference_max_age_ms (workflow, ops script, admin route, durable row) and defaulted to seven days. A host with any attempt row inside the window, whichever way that move went, is not a candidate; the claim re-reads it under lock so an attempt landing between scan and claim cannot start a second move. Skips are named host_cooldown, and the lookup rides a new index on (user_id, relay_host_id, created_at). - The candidate scan now also requires the target cell to be enabled, so it mirrors the claim-time filter exactly and stops spending batch slots on candidates that are certain to be skipped. - Region CHECK lists are rendered from the shared region list instead of being written out four times. - The operations runbook states that cells without the drain protocol are neither sources, targets, nor members of the safety gate. * fix(relay): keep rehome reads and brakes working across the cooldown rollout The ops script validated hostCooldownMs on every inspected control, so against any director image predating the field inspect, pause, disable, and failed-enable recovery all threw client-side. The workflow always runs from main while the director image is operator-supplied, so that window opened at merge and reopened on every rollback: the operator lost read-only visibility and both emergency brakes while the worker could still be enabled. The field is now validated only when the director reports it, and every apply body that echoes an inspected control omits the key when that control lacks it, so a legacy director never sees an unknown key. The write path stays fail-closed the other way: enable refuses up front, before any mutation, when the director does not report a cooldown it could honour. Also replaces two bare 'us-central1' defaults with RELAY_DEFAULT_REGION.
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.
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, and the workflow variable reference indocs/relay-workflows.md.
Workflows
The 24 .github/workflows/cloud-*.yml workflows are the relay's deploy and
operate surface: publish and deploy the director, roll GCE cell capacity,
operate Asia admission and regional rehoming, prove staging capacity, monitor
production, and power staging up and down. .github/actions/cloud-sql-rollout-lease
is the compare-and-swap lease that serializes every rollout against the shared
Cloud SQL instance.
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.