Every key needed an operator with a shell. This adds the login system that
made that necessary, which is the thing I argued against building until it was
asked for — so it is built as if it will be attacked, because a public login
form is.
Signing up produces an account that can do nothing. Approval is what makes it
work and stays on the CLI: having a shell on the control plane is what makes
someone an administrator, and that is a smaller thing to get right than roles
and an admin UI that mints credentials.
The details that matter:
Passwords are argon2id, where a slow hash is correct — the input is chosen by
a human and has a dictionary, which is the opposite of an API key. Both kinds
of authentication now live in this codebase and they are in separate packages
so neither set of assumptions leaks into the other. Length is the only rule:
composition rules push people towards Password1! and cost more entropy than
they buy.
Signup never says whether an address already has an account, and sign-in
answers the same way for a wrong password and a missing account — verifying
against a dummy hash when there is no user, so a stopwatch cannot enumerate
accounts. Account state is checked after the password, not before, so guessing
an address reveals nothing about it. Guessing is bounded per address rather
than per IP: an attacker has many addresses to come from and one to guess
against, and limiting by IP locks out an office behind one NAT.
Sessions are server-side, so signing out and suspending take effect
immediately rather than whenever a token expires; suspension is checked in the
same query that resolves the session, because a second round trip is a check
somebody eventually forgets. Every state-changing form carries a CSRF token
verified against a hash in the session — a cookie authenticates the browser,
not the page that asked.
Key ownership is enforced in the UPDATE rather than by reading first, so a
guessed key id from another account changes nothing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The page explained the API, said keys come from an operator, and left the
reader there. Someone who reaches the address without a key had no route to
getting one, which is where onboarding stopped.
`landing.contact` is that route, because the gateway cannot guess who to ask.
An address becomes a mailto link, an http(s) URL stays a link, and anything
else — a channel, a queue, a person — is shown as text. Other schemes are
never linked: this string comes from configuration, configuration is not
always written by whoever runs the gateway, and a javascript: href on a page
served to every visitor is a short path to a stored XSS. Escaping the text
does not make a scheme safe.
Unconfigured, it now says something rather than nothing, and the page explains
that a key arrives as a one-time link so the reader knows what to expect
before it lands.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The second half of phase 5. A key now has a cost, a quota and a bill.
Rate limits use a sliding window rather than a fixed one. A fixed window lets
a caller send its whole minute's allowance in the last second of one window
and again in the first second of the next, so the observed rate is twice the
configured limit exactly when the system is least able to take it. Checking
and charging are one operation, or two concurrent requests both see room and
both take it.
Token limits are checked against an estimate, because the real count only
exists once the request has run; the difference is charged afterwards, so a
caller who consistently underestimates is still bounded, one window late. A
request with no max_tokens gets a modest assumption rather than zero —
assuming zero would let an unbounded request through every token limit.
Limits are checked before admission, not after: a request over its quota
should be refused rather than queued, where it would occupy a band's capacity
to no purpose. All refusals are 429, but a spent budget carries no Retry-After
because waiting does not help until the period rolls over, and saying
otherwise turns one client into a retry loop.
Usage goes to a buffered channel and is written in batches. Record never
blocks: if the buffer fills — a database stalled long enough to lose eight
thousand records — records are dropped and counted, because losing accounting
is bad and turning a stalled database into an outage is worse. A clean
shutdown drains what is queued; those are requests that were already served.
Failures are logged at error, since silently losing billing data is the kind
of thing discovered at the end of a month.
Requests are accounted whatever their outcome. A request that used a GPU and
then failed still used it, and a key that could spend nothing by failing would
be a way around a budget.
Budgets are counted in memory and restored from the store at startup, so a
restart does not hand every key a fresh allowance. The budget period travels
with the reservation rather than being re-derived, because a monthly budget
credited to a daily counter is a budget that never binds.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Until now anything that could reach the client port could use every model in
the catalog. A key now resolves to an identity, and that identity decides what
it may do.
Authentication wraps the whole mux rather than checking inside each handler,
so adding a route cannot add an unauthenticated one by omission. Health stays
open, because a load balancer has no key and a health check that needs one
reports the gateway down.
Nothing on the request path reads the database. A key is resolved once and
answered from memory until the entry expires; rejections are cached too, so a
client looping with a bad key cannot turn into a database read per request.
The price is that a revocation takes up to cache_ttl to take effect, which is
the trade stated in the configuration next to the knob. A store failure is
not an authentication answer: it is never cached as one and returns 503, not
401 — sending someone hunting for a key problem that does not exist wastes the
one thing an incident is short of. A revoked key is refused with the same
message as an unknown one, because saying otherwise confirms the key was real.
With auth on the band comes from the key and the band header is ignored. The
header was trusted only while there was nothing to consult, and it let any
client promote itself into the top priority band. Tenant fairness within a
band is now per key rather than per session, so one caller cannot take a band
by opening many sessions.
Allowlists are decided per model, not per string: a model's canonical name and
every alias name the same thing, so either form works in an allowlist and no
alias can reach a model that was not allowed. The first version of that test
passed without the resolution being there at all, which is why it now checks
all four combinations.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two bugs found while verifying mTLS against real machines.
session cancelled its own derived context and then asked that context
whether the agent was shutting down. The answer was always yes, so every
stream error read as a clean close: the log said err=<nil>, the backoff
reset, and an agent whose certificate the control plane refused hammered it
forever at the base interval with nothing to diagnose. It now keeps the
parent context to answer that question, and a refusal reaches the operator
naming both the certificate and the claim.
Cancelling the context also did not stop the agent. HTTP/2 watches the
context while the request body is being written, and a bidirectional stream
spends its life blocked on the read side instead, so the read never returned.
Measured on a deployed node: `systemctl stop llmgw-agent` took 90 seconds and
ended in SIGKILL, on every restart. Closing the response when the context
ends is what actually unblocks it.
TestAgentStopsWhenContextEnds hangs reliably without the second fix, which is
the only reason to trust that it tests it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
One bidirectional connect-go stream per node, carrying registration, heartbeats
and shard status up, and start, stop and drain down. The agent dials out: GPU
nodes sit behind firewalls far more often than a control plane does, and an
outbound connection needs no inbound rule on every node in the fleet.
- registration carries the whole hardware inventory, so there is no separate
discovery call and a reconnecting agent refreshes what the scheduler knows.
The fabric labels travel with it; they cannot be inferred from the wire, so
losing them in transit would silently disable multi-node placement.
- agentsvc is both the stream handler and the reconciler's dispatcher, because
it holds the open streams and is therefore the only thing that can deliver a
command to a node.
- the agent validates a profile before launching anything, since an engine that
refuses a profile does so after minutes of loading, then supervises the
process and reports every transition with the engine's output tail on failure.
- reconnects forever with jittered backoff. A control plane restart must not
require touching every GPU node, and a fleet must not reconnect in lockstep
and knock it over again. Engines keep serving throughout, because the router
talks to them directly.
llmgw agent is real now, and llmgw server runs a control plane whenever any
model declares a profile. The static endpoint list stays for router-only runs.
Verified with real binaries as separate processes: the agent registers, a
replica is placed, an engine launches through the vLLM adapter's actual argument
construction, streaming traffic is served, and killing the agent moves the node
through unreachable to lost with placement explaining why nothing can run.
config.Model and catalog.Model were the same thing described twice, so the
router now reads catalog entries directly and the validation rules live in one
place.
Still missing: mTLS. The stream is plaintext HTTP/2 and must stay on a trusted
network until that lands.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Inserted between quota checks and scheduling: admission answers when a request
may proceed, the scheduler still answers where it goes. Keeping them apart is
the point — an engine queue is FIFO and knows nothing about tenants, so once a
batch job is in it, no endpoint selection rescues the request behind it.
- saturation detector: one number per pool, the worse of queue depth and KV
occupancy, since either alone misleads.
- priority bands with per-band saturation ceilings, so the cluster degrades from
the bottom up.
- tenant round-robin within a band: one caller sending a thousand requests takes
one slot in the rotation, not a thousand.
- bounded queues with capacity (503) and TTL (504); cancelled requests leave the
queue instead of holding capacity.
- metrics for queue depth, wait time, rejections and pool saturation.
Exit criterion, measured in test/e2e: with 500 concurrent bronze requests
running continuously, interactive p99 in the platinum band stays at 1.04-1.24x
idle against a 1.5x budget. With admission off the same load pushes it to
55-60x. Both directions are asserted, so the test fails if admission regresses
and also if the load generator stops being a real load.
Two lags had to be closed, and they needed different answers. Engine metrics are
scraped and lag an interval; router inflight does not, but it counts running
requests, and treating those as queue makes a healthy engine look overloaded
every interval. What is actually queued is inflight minus batch capacity, and
capacity is not in the metric contract, so it is learned as the high-water mark
of observed running. Separately, between admission granting a request and the
router dispatching it the request is invisible everywhere, so a simultaneous
burst passed the check en masse; the controller now counts its own outstanding
leases against dispatched inflight.
One plan correction: a saturation ceiling of 1.0 was documented as "never held
back". It is not — it means "flow up to the healthy limit". A band that must
never wait needs a ceiling above 1. Plan §7.2.2 updated.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
llmgw server is real now. It fronts a static set of engine replicas with an
OpenAI-compatible API, scoring endpoints through the pipeline added in the
previous commit.
- proxy: SSE relayed event by event with a flush after each, cancellation
propagated upstream, and separate deadlines for dial, headers, first token,
inter-token idle and total. The idle watchdog is what distinguishes a wedged
engine from a slow one.
- router: dispatch with retry and model fallback. Retry only happens while
nothing has reached the client; after that, splicing two responses together
would be worse than the short stream the client already sees.
- config: YAML via koanf overlaid on defaults, with LLMGW_ env overrides.
Validation rejects duplicate endpoint ids and aliases that shadow a model,
because both misroute silently at request time rather than failing loudly.
- metrics: requests, duration, TTFT, tokens, plus per-scorer values and
per-filter drops on a separate admin listener with health and pprof.
Phase 1 exit criterion, measured in test/e2e: 1000 concurrent streams across
3 sim-engines complete at ~6800 req/s; every client disconnect frees the KV
blocks on every engine; router overhead p99 is about 0.9 ms against the plan's
2 ms budget.
The handlers live in internal/router rather than an internal/router/openai
package as the plan's tree sketched: they need the dispatch loop, and splitting
them apart would have meant an interface with exactly one implementation. Plan
§4 updated to match.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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