OpenShell/architecture

OpenShell Architecture

OpenShell runs autonomous AI agents in sandboxed environments with explicit policy, credential, identity, and network boundaries. The target architecture is built around three stable runtime components: the CLI, the Gateway, and the Supervisor.

The CLI, SDK, and TUI provide user-facing access. The gateway is the authenticated control plane: it owns API access, durable state, policy and settings delivery, provider and inference configuration, and relay coordination. The supervisor runs inside every sandbox workload and is the local security boundary. It launches the agent as a restricted child process and enforces policy where process identity, filesystem access, network egress, and runtime credentials are visible.

Infrastructure-specific work sits behind integration boundaries. Compute, credentials, control-plane identity, and sandbox identity each have a driver or adapter boundary so OpenShell can integrate with native runtimes, secret stores, identity providers, and workload identity systems without moving those concerns into the core gateway or sandbox model.

flowchart TB
    subgraph USER["User Interfaces"]
        CLI["CLI"]
        SDK["SDK"]
        TUI["TUI"]
    end

    subgraph CP["Control Plane"]
        GW["Gateway core"]
        DB[("Shared persistence")]
        COMPUTE["Compute"]
        CREDS["Credentials"]
        CPIDENT["Control-plane identity"]
        SIDENT["Sandbox identity"]
        CDRV["Compute driver"]
        CRDRV["Credentials driver"]
        CPIDRV["Control-plane identity driver"]
        SIDRV["Sandbox identity driver"]
    end

    subgraph INFRA["Integrated Infrastructure"]
        RUNTIME["Docker / Podman / Kubernetes / VM"]
        SECRETSTORE["Eg: Keychain / Secret Service / Vault / Kubernetes Secrets"]
        IDP["Eg: mTLS / OIDC / Local identity"]
        WORKLOADID["Eg: SPIFFE / Gateway-issued workload identity"]
    end

    subgraph DP["Sandbox Data Plane"]
        SUP["Supervisor"]
        PROXY["Policy proxy"]
        ROUTER["Inference router"]
        POLICY["OPA policy engine"]
        AGENT["Restricted agent process"]
    end

    CLI -->|"gRPC / HTTP"| GW
    SDK -->|"gRPC / HTTP"| GW
    TUI -->|"gRPC / HTTP"| GW

    GW --> DB
    GW --> COMPUTE
    GW --> CREDS
    GW --> CPIDENT
    GW --> SIDENT

    COMPUTE -->|"gRPC / UDS"| CDRV
    CREDS -->|"gRPC / UDS"| CRDRV
    CPIDENT -->|"gRPC / UDS"| CPIDRV
    SIDENT -->|"gRPC / UDS"| SIDRV

    CDRV --> RUNTIME
    CRDRV --> SECRETSTORE
    CPIDRV --> IDP
    SIDRV --> WORKLOADID
    RUNTIME -->|"provisions workload"| SUP

    SUP -->|"outbound control, config, logs, relay"| GW
    SUP -->|"spawn + restrict"| AGENT
    AGENT -->|"all ordinary egress"| PROXY
    PROXY -->|"evaluate"| POLICY
    PROXY -->|"allowed traffic"| EXT["External services"]
    PROXY -->|"inference.local"| ROUTER
    ROUTER -->|"managed inference"| MODEL["Inference backends"]

Core Boundaries

Component	Boundary
CLI, SDK, TUI	User-facing management surfaces. They talk to the gateway and do not need to know which infrastructure drivers are active.
Gateway	Authenticated control plane, API server, durable state, policy and settings delivery, provider and inference config, supervisor session ownership, and relay coordination.
Compute subsystem	Sandbox lifecycle semantics: creation, deletion, watching, reconciliation, and state transitions. Platform provisioning details belong to the compute driver.
Credentials subsystem	Logical provider and credential resolution. Secret storage and platform-native credential access belong to credentials drivers.
Control-plane identity	Authentication and authorization for users, operators, and API clients. External identity verification belongs to identity drivers.
Sandbox identity	Workload identity for supervisors and sandbox-to-sandbox authorization. Identity issuance or verification belongs to sandbox identity drivers.
Supervisor	Sandbox-local security boundary. It prepares isolation, fetches config, injects credentials, runs relay endpoints, starts the proxy, and launches restricted agent processes.
Policy proxy	Mandatory egress path for agent traffic. It enforces destination, binary identity, SSRF, TLS/L7, credential injection, and inference interception rules.
Inference router	Sandbox-local forwarding for https://inference.local to configured model backends.

Integrating with the Ecosystem

OpenShell should integrate with infrastructure ecosystems instead of replacing them. The core value is safe, policy-enforced agent execution. Runtimes, schedulers, secret stores, identity providers, workload identity systems, image pipelines, storage, and GPU or device exposure should remain owned by the platforms that already provide them.

The gateway owns OpenShell control-plane semantics: sandbox state, lifecycle ordering, policy and settings resolution, credential mapping, authorization, inference configuration, and relay coordination. Drivers translate those semantics into platform-native operations. They should stay thin, preserve native behavior by default, and report platform lifecycle events back through the shared contracts.

The supervisor owns OpenShell sandbox semantics. Filesystem policy, process privilege reduction, network proxying, inference interception, credential injection, security logging, and gateway relay behavior should remain consistent across runtimes.

This keeps OpenShell usable in local single-player setups, Kubernetes deployments, VM-backed sandboxes, and future third-party environments. A new integration should make OpenShell feel like a well-behaved member of that ecosystem.

Gateways and Sandboxes

The gateway and sandbox split control-plane authority from runtime enforcement. The gateway owns durable platform state: sandboxes, policy revisions, runtime settings, provider records, inference configuration, session records, and authorization decisions. A sandbox owns the local execution boundary: process identity, filesystem access, network egress, credential injection, local logs, and the agent child process.

The relationship is supervisor initiated. Each sandbox supervisor connects outbound to a known gateway endpoint, authenticates as a sandbox workload, and keeps a live session open for control traffic and relays. This avoids requiring every compute driver to solve gateway-to-sandbox reachability through pod IPs, bridge networks, port mappings, NAT traversal, or bespoke tunnels. The common runtime requirement is narrower: the supervisor must be able to reach the gateway.

The Windows MXC driver is an explicit exception. It launches and monitors a one-shot workload in the driver, self-reports readiness, and does not expose a supervisor session, interactive connect, live policy delivery, or governed egress.

The gateway delivers desired state; the sandbox applies it locally. Policy, settings, credentials, and inference routes flow from the gateway to the supervisor. The supervisor validates and applies what can change at runtime, keeps last-known-good config when refresh fails, and leaves static isolation controls in place until the sandbox is recreated.

Live operations use the same authenticated gateway-supervisor relationship. Config refresh, policy updates, credential delivery, log push, connect, exec, file sync, and relay setup are multiplexed over supervisor sessions. If a session drops, the sandbox may keep running, but live operations fail or become unreachable until the supervisor reconnects and reconciles state.

Architecture Docs

Architecture docs are short subsystem overviews. User-facing how-to content lives in docs/. Implementation notes that only matter to one crate belong in that crate's README.md.

Document	Purpose
Gateway	Gateway control plane, auth, APIs, persistence, settings, and relay coordination.
Sandbox	Sandbox supervisor, child process isolation, proxy, credentials, inference, connect, and logs.
Sandbox Limits	Sandbox supervisor and egress safety ceilings, ownership rules, current enforcement, and known gaps.
Security Policy	Policy model, enforcement layers, policy updates, policy advisor, and security logging.
Compute Runtimes	Docker, Podman, Kubernetes, VM, sandbox images, and runtime-specific responsibilities.
Build	Build artifacts, CI/E2E, docs site validation, and release packaging.
Google Vertex AI Provider	Implementation reference for the google-vertex-ai provider, from CLI through gateway to sandbox.
Windows MSVC Build	Build-only native Windows MSVC lane (x64/ARM64) and unsupported-runtime behavior on Windows.

rfc/ vs architecture/

Broad design proposals start as GitHub issues. If maintainers decide a proposal needs broad consensus, they assign an RFC number from the issue and the RFC lives in rfc/. Once an RFC is adopted, appropriate details should be written back to architecture docs.

architecture/ serves as the canonical reference for OpenShell's design and architecture.

rfc serves to help facilitate discussion and ensure the few changes that need that level of review are appropriately designed. These are useful for understanding the context in which certain architecture designs were made.