Open_Ultra_SAST/ops/ax/README.md

ax on this host

The service plane (.kiro/specs/ai-service-plane/) runs every task on google/ax over Agent Substrate in a single-node kind cluster. ax is the only executor; ousast plane run submits, resumes, starts and collects.

Bring-up

ops/ax/up.sh          # idempotent: kind + registry, Substrate, ax, gVisor worker pool, egress gateway,
                      # receiver Service, runner image (digest pinned), ax CLI, smoke Task
ousast plane doctor   # kind, Substrate, ax controller, runner image
ops/ax/smoke-run.sh   # end to end: repo-facts on ax, artifacts back on the host, attribution table
ops/ax/down.sh        # deletes the cluster and its registry

Tools live in ~/go/bin (kind, ax, ko, kubectl-ate) and ~/.local/bin (kubectl); sources and rendered files in ~/.cache/ousast/ax-src/ (the runner digest pin is runner-image there).

How a Run executes

A Run (plane/runs/*.yaml, kind openultrasast.io/v1alpha1 Run) is a DAG of steps; each step names an ax Task (plane/tasks/), its inputs and outputs, and its own budget: {usd, calls}. Every Task binds its Workspaces (plane/workspaces/) and one ax Model (plane/models/): deepseek-flash for chat, openrouter-embedding (OpenAI text-embedding-3-small through OpenRouter) for embeddings. ousast plane run (plane/reconciler.py) applies Workspaces before the Tasks that bind them, resumes each Task, sends its start signal, collects its artifacts and records state under $OUSAST_RESULTS/plane/<run>/ (default ~/ousast-results/plane/); a rerun skips tasks already done, and --workers bounds the tasks in flight.

Runner contract (plane/runner.py, PID 1 of the runner image). ax hands the Task in AX_TASK_YAML and the Workspaces in AX_WORKSPACES_YAML; the runner serves /healthz and /readyz (503 until every workspace is materialised). Agent Substrate boots each template once as a golden actor to snapshot it, so the command never starts by itself: it waits for POST /ousast/v1/start with {run, task, credentials}, which the reconciler sends through Substrate's atenet-router to that actor only (plane/router.py). The provider key exists only in that request: the runner keeps it in memory, passes it to the command's environment, redacts it from echoed stderr and never writes it. The reconciler reads the variable the Model's secretKey.key names from the operator's environment or .env (which never overrides an exported variable). After the command exits, the runner posts OUSAST_OUTPUT_DIR as a tar to the receiver; that delivery is the task's completion, and a completion marker stops a resumed actor from repeating billed work.

Budgets. The metered client refuses the next call once a task's usd or calls ceiling is reached; the task ends unfinished and resumes on a rerun with a larger budget. An account or authentication error ends it failed. Model-free tasks run with {usd: 0, calls: 0}, so a stray call fails loudly.

Egress (plane/egress.py). One EgressPolicy per actor through the atenet-egress gateway, deny by default, hostnames only: plain HTTP to the artifact receiver, TLS passthrough to the source hosts of the bound Workspaces and to the hosts the bound Model declares (openultrasast.io/egress-hosts). The policy is deleted with the actor.

Token attribution. ousast plane status <run> prints per task its status and calls, prompt, cache_hit and output tokens and usd from the tasks' summary.json, and writes <run dir>/attribution.json; --units adds per-unit rows.

Tasks

Task	Model	Does
repo-facts	none	functions per product file, and each candidate's call sites in other files
verify (passes a, b, c)	deepseek-flash	batched tool hunt per file over the candidates, with their known callers
agree	none	a and b agreed or disputed; after pass c on the disputed, 2-of-3 (the step final)
features	none	one feature record per candidate for the decision engine
remember	none	the case's artifacts as memory rows (facts, verdict, unit_cost, alert, coverage, features)
alerts	none	the quick scan on the vulnerable and fixed pins (loop Runs)
loop	none	the steps snapshot, measure, propose, improve: the improvement loop as a Run
roles	deepseek-flash	per-repository source, sink and sanitizer roles without a vocabulary (decision-engine harvest)

Generators: ousast plane workspaces <population> --validation-set ... writes the per-case chain (facts -> va, vb -> agree -> vc -> final -> features -> remember, plus alerts and the loop with --loop); ousast plane harvest --labels ... --plane DIR writes the decision engine's harvest Runs; ousast plane alerts-engine produces a Run's alerts from the Joern engine image on the host, for PHP and other languages quick mode does not cover.

Memory store

plane/memory.py. One store keyed by repository and pin holds what runs learned: index.jsonl, facts/ by content hash, repos/<host>__<owner>__<name>/<pin>.jsonl rows, and content-addressed blobs (excerpts, embeddings, cached model responses, compiled programs). ousast plane remember <run> ingests a run's rows; a repeated ingest is skipped by the index. A facts entry is reused for the same repository, pin, candidates and runner image.

OUSAST_MEMORY selects the backend:

• file:///path (FileStore), default $OUSAST_RESULTS/plane/memory; it refuses to write below 1 GiB free;
• minio://<bucket>[/<prefix>] (MinioStore, the minio extra), used on the maintainer's MinIO. Endpoint and credentials come from .env or the environment (MINIO_ENDPOINT, MINIO_ACCESS_KEY, MINIO_SECRET_KEY, MINIO_SECURE), never from a manifest, and are never printed.

ousast improve --memory [STORE] and the ousast learn commands (--memory) read the same store.

Measured footprint (2026-09-29, idle, two workers)

Item	Value
kind node container memory	1.7 GiB (27% of the 7.7 GiB host)
registry container memory	34 MiB
node volume (images, containerd)	4.9 GB on disk
worker pool	2 gVisor workers, 1 CPU / 1.5 GiB limit each

Disk is the binding constraint: the Substrate install and ko builds need several GB of Go caches. Clear them afterwards (go clean -cache -modcache); rerunning the full Substrate install on a near-full disk fails in ko resolve.

What this host taught (each one cost a failed live run)

• Substrate installs no WorkerPool ("no free workers") -> workerpool.yaml.tmpl.
• Actor images must be pinned by digest; ax's default runner image on gcr.io needs credentials.
• A release ax CLI skews from the server; build it from the deployed checkout.
• ax's API rejects unknown fields; metadata is name + atespace; Git entries have no commit.
• ax apply leaves a Task Suspended until ax resume; the first resume may time out while Substrate builds the template's golden snapshot. ax has no Completed phase: completion is our artifact delivery.
• Substrate boots each template once as a golden actor with the task's env, so the runner waits for a start request sent through atenet-router; the provider key travels only in that request.
• Actor egress goes through the atenet-egress gateway, deny by default, one EgressPolicy per actor, hostnames only; the gateway dials the address the actor connected to, so the receiver is a Service dialled by ClusterIP with its name as Host. The Envoy gateway needs a Rust build; the agentgateway variant needs none.
• Apply a Task after the Workspaces it binds; ax copies them at create time.
• Every Task is its own actor template with a golden actor (~24 MB under /var/lib/ate/actors on the node). Deleting them failed while the snapshot bucket ax's templates name (dberkov-gke-dev3, from AX_SNAPSHOTS_BUCKET) did not exist in rustfs: golden actors piled up in DELETING and filled the disk during a 600-task harvest (2026-10-01). Create that bucket in rustfs (an aws-cli pod with the rustfs-bucket-init env); even then a deleted actor's directory stays on the node, so long Runs need a janitor that removes directories no live actor owns.
• A Workspace's files reach the actor inline in one environment variable: above ~20 KB of content the template fails with "actor template not found" (an 86 KB and a 31 KB excerpt did; 7 KB ran).

Memory store on S3 (MinIO or RustFS)

OUSAST_MEMORY=minio://<bucket>[/<prefix>] puts the plane's memory store (plane/memory.py) in an S3-compatible bucket. MinIO and RustFS both work; the maintainer's server is RustFS. Endpoint and credentials come from .env (MINIO_ENDPOINT, MINIO_ACCESS_KEY, MINIO_SECRET_KEY, MINIO_SECURE, optional MINIO_REGION, which avoids a GetBucketLocation call) and are never printed.

The store never configures its bucket. An admin sets it up once. Each time a MinioStore is opened it checks the setup (MinioStore.verify_bucket), using reads plus one small probe object at <prefix>/_probe/select.jsonl. If anything is missing, it refuses to start with a MemoryStoreError that lists each missing piece and the admin command that fixes it. Nothing is skipped quietly. The store needs:

• versioning Enabled, because provenance cites object version ids;
• an enabled lifecycle rule expiring <prefix>/runs/ (raw run outputs) after a number of days, 30 by default. The rule must be a plain prefix filter, and no rule may expire the whole store (repos/, facts/, index.jsonl and the blobs are kept);
• S3 Select (SelectObjectContent over JSON Lines). Every filtered read is pushed down to the server, and there is no fetch-and-filter fallback. A server without Select (some MinIO releases removed it) is refused;
• object tags readable, because rows are filtered by their kind tag.

One-time admin setup (admin credentials, bucket sast-memory, store at the bucket root):

aws s3api put-bucket-versioning --endpoint-url "$MINIO_ENDPOINT" --bucket sast-memory \
    --versioning-configuration Status=Enabled
aws s3api put-bucket-lifecycle-configuration --endpoint-url "$MINIO_ENDPOINT" --bucket sast-memory \
    --lifecycle-configuration '{"Rules":[{"ID":"ousast-runs-expiry","Status":"Enabled",
      "Filter":{"Prefix":"runs/"},"Expiration":{"Days":30}}]}'

put-bucket-lifecycle-configuration replaces every rule on the bucket, so merge this rule with any rules already there. The agent account's policy can read the bucket's configuration but not change it. It reads and writes objects and their tags, and it gets no Put* on versioning or lifecycle:

{"Version": "2012-10-17", "Statement": [
  {"Effect": "Allow", "Action": ["s3:ListBucket", "s3:GetBucketLocation", "s3:GetBucketVersioning",
                                 "s3:GetLifecycleConfiguration"],
   "Resource": ["arn:aws:s3:::sast-memory"]},
  {"Effect": "Allow", "Action": ["s3:GetObject", "s3:GetObjectVersion", "s3:PutObject", "s3:DeleteObject",
                                 "s3:GetObjectTagging", "s3:PutObjectTagging", "s3:GetObjectVersionTagging"],
   "Resource": ["arn:aws:s3:::sast-memory/*"]}]}

Measured state on 2026-10-02 (agent sast-memory-agent): versioning was Enabled and a 30-day rule on runs/ was in place. verify_bucket first refused because GetObjectTagging returned AccessDenied for the agent; with the three tagging permissions above (s3:GetObjectTagging, s3:PutObjectTagging, s3:GetObjectVersionTagging) the real-server contract tests pass.

Fixed schema: every row carries every queryable field. RustFS's Select infers an object's JSON schema from its first 1000 rows (measured 2026-10-02). Two failures follow:

• a where field missing from those rows, even if row 5000 has it, fails with EvaluatorBindingDoesNotExist;
• a column that is null in all of those rows and set in a later one fails the whole object with JSONParsingError, whatever the where names (999 leading nulls answer, 1000 fail). A column holding two JSON types (a string, then a number) fails the same way at any size.

So plane/memory.py declares per kind the fields a where may name (QUERY_FIELDS, besides the fields every row has). They are strings, and the store writes all of them on every row at write time, "" where one does not apply (never null). rows() refuses an unknown kind, a where on a field no kind declares, and where = null, before any read: a new query declares its field first. Rows written before the rule are rewritten once with ousast plane memory-normalise [--store URL] [--dry-run], which is idempotent and prints its counts; on a bucket it writes new object versions, and versioning keeps the old ones. Run it when a store moves to RustFS. The store never answers "no rows" for a failed Select; it raises a MemoryStoreError naming the object and the cause.

The real-server contract tests (OUSAST_MEMORY_TEST_MINIO=1, bucket OUSAST_MEMORY_TEST_BUCKET, else MINIO_BUCKET) verify the bucket at its root and write only under a fresh contract-<id>/ prefix. They never configure the bucket.

Moving to a separate Kubernetes cluster (planned)

The maintainer will deploy the plane to its own Kubernetes environment. The manifests under plane/ move as they are; these parts assume this laptop and must change first (checked 2026-09-30):

Assumption	Where	Needed in a real cluster
Artifact receiver runs on the developer host, reached through the ousast-receiver Service with an EndpointSlice to the kind gateway 172.19.0.1:18090	egress.py, receiver-service.yaml.tmpl	the receiver as an in-cluster Deployment (or object storage, e.g. Substrate's S3-compatible store), with the reconciler reading from it
Registry localhost:5001, rewritten by Substrate for kind	up.sh, doctor.py:45, runner digest pin	a registry the workers can pull from; keep digest pins (Substrate rejects tags)
kubectl context kind-$KIND_CLUSTER_NAME	doctor.py:39, egress.py, router.py	one configurable context (for example OUSAST_KUBE_CONTEXT)
ax's snapshot bucket: AX_SNAPSHOTS_BUCKET in ax's deploy/ax-server.yaml points at the ax authors' GCS bucket	ax deploy manifest	your own bucket, set before deploying ax
Egress gateway applied by hand (agentgateway variant, no Rust build)	this README	the Substrate-installed gateway; per-task EgressPolicies work unchanged
Worker pool of 2 x 1 CPU / 1.5 GiB for the 7 GB host	workerpool.yaml.tmpl	sized to the cluster; --workers to match
Plane memory store and results under ~/ousast-results/ on the host	reconciler.py (OUSAST_RESULTS), memory.py (OUSAST_MEMORY)	a persistent volume or bucket shared by the reconciler; the minio:// store already works against any reachable MinIO

The provider key already travels only in the start request through atenet-router, which works the same through a port-forward to any cluster.

What a larger ax deployment needs

A Kubernetes cluster with Agent Substrate (and its egress gateway), the ax control plane, a registry the workers can pull from, the runner image pinned by digest, the receiver reachable as a Service, and the provider host allowed per task. The manifests under plane/ move unchanged; only OUSAST_ARTIFACT_* and the context change.