Runtime topology
kora runs as a set of control-plane services in orbit-system and per-tenant workloads in tenant-isolated namespaces, on a shared substrate of Postgres, Redis, SPIRE, and an Istio mesh.
Traffic and enforcement
Edge OPA at the Istio ingress gateway authorizes north-south requests. In tenant pods, a sidecar OPA authorizes outbound calls. Control-plane services enforce the same scopes in-process. See policy for the enforcement model.
Control plane and tenant workloads
- Control plane (
orbit-system). The governing services own identity, policy, agent run lifecycle, and triggers. The operator reconciles the tenant and platform CRDs. - Tenant workloads. The agent runtime pod and its per-run sandbox run in a tenant namespace. These workloads hold no credentials and reach the control plane over the mesh. See agent execution for pod internals.
Egress brokers
The inference-gateway, egress-gateway, and tool-gateway broker the agent's outbound access, one class each: model inference, external connectors, and MCP tools. The agent sends no credential of its own. The broker injects one just in time. See connectivity.
Substrate
Postgres holds durable state, Redis backs queues and caching, SPIRE issues the workload identity behind mesh mTLS, and the Istio mesh carries service-to-service traffic.