// ARCHITECTURE SPECIFICATION

OpsGimbal Resilience Mesh

OpsGimbal is a high-performance reverse proxy and circuit-breaking mesh engineered specifically for enterprise LLM workloads. Built by Site Reliability Engineers, OpsGimbal prevents cascading socket exhaustion, provider 429 throttling, and regional outages from breaking user-facing applications.

INGRESS OVERHEAD < 4.2ms p50

PRIMARY UPSTREAM Anthropic Claude 3.5

FAILOVER TIME 12ms Sub-Socket

// DEPLOYMENT

Quickstart Installation

Deploy the OpsGimbal sidecar adjacent to your application tier using Docker or Kubernetes DaemonSet.

# 1. Pull and run the OpsGimbal gateway container

docker run -d \

--name opsgimbal-gateway \

-p 8080:8080 \

-v $(pwd)/gimbal.yaml:/etc/opsgimbal/gimbal.yaml:ro \

-e ANTHROPIC_API_KEY="sk-ant-..." \

opsgimbal/gateway:v0.9.4

# 2. Verify proxy readiness and circuit health

curl http://localhost:8080/health

{"status":"healthy","circuit":"CLOSED","latency_p50_ms":3.1}

// TOPOLOGY & NETWORKING

Inference Flow Topology

OpsGimbal acts as an intelligent Layer 7 reverse proxy deployed inline between your application tier and upstream model APIs. Every request passes through health evaluation before and during streaming execution.

STEP 01

Ingress & Auth

Client applications dispatch OpenAI/Anthropic-compatible payloads to http://localhost:8080/v1.

Header validation & rate limiting

STEP 02 (CORE)

Primary Route (Claude 3.5)

Dispatched to Anthropic Claude 3.5 Sonnet over streaming SSE with dynamic token-bucket smoothing.

Target latency: < 284ms p50

STEP 03 (FAILOVER)

Standby Shunting

If upstream times out (>4.5s) or returns 5xx/429, the circuit trips and shunts payload to local Ollama/vLLM in <12ms.

Zero dropped client packets

// SPECIFICATION

Configuration Spec (`gimbal.yaml`)

Routes, circuit thresholds, and failover topologies are defined declaratively in a single manifest.

version: "0.9"
gateway:
  port: 8080
  timeout_ms: 4500
  worker_threads: 4

routes:
  - id: "llm-inference"
    protocol: "http/sse"
    primary_upstream:
      provider: "anthropic"
      model: "claude-3-5-sonnet-20241022"
      max_retries: 2
      retry_backoff_ms: 250

    circuit_breaker:
      failure_threshold_ratio: 0.05 # Trip if 5% requests fail within window
      sampling_window_secs: 10
      half_open_trial_requests: 5
      cooldown_secs: 30

    failover_standby:
      provider: "local-gpu"
      endpoint: "unix:///var/run/vllm/vllm.sock"
      model: "meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct"

// RELIABILITY ENGINEERING

Autonomous Circuit Breaker & SLOs

The circuit breaker state machine prevents cascading outages by decoupling application frontends from transient upstream degradation.

CLOSED (Normal)

100% of incoming inference traffic routes directly to the primary Anthropic Claude upstream. Socket health is measured continuously.

Threshold: Error ratio < 5%

OPEN (Tripped)

Upstream socket failed or timed out. OpsGimbal immediately intercepts all requests and shunts to local standby without waiting for upstream timeout.

Duration: 30s cooldown window

HALF-OPEN (Probe)

After the cooldown expires, 5 probe requests are sent to Claude. If all 5 succeed, the circuit resets to CLOSED. If any fail, it re-trips.

Trial sample: 5 requests

SLO Metric Target	Specification	Enforcement Mechanism
Proxy Gateway Latency	< 4.2ms (p50), < 8.1ms (p99)	Zero-copy streaming pipeline
Availability During Outage	99.99% Guaranteed Ingest	Automatic local GPU failover
Failover Dispatch Time	< 12ms Sub-Socket Shunt	Pre-warmed local Unix sockets

// STRATEGIC UPSTREAM

Anthropic Claude Integration

OpsGimbal is optimized for Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Opus APIs. Requests use streaming Server-Sent Events (SSE) with bidirectional socket health probing and automatic rate-limit token bucket management.

Why Claude is the Primary Production Core

Claude 3.5 Sonnet delivers industry-leading reasoning benchmarks and coding capabilities. OpsGimbal acts as the enterprise ingress tier that ensures high-throughput teams can push massive Claude token volume without risking pipeline failure when third-party client networks experience transient hiccups.

claude-3-5-sonnet Streaming SSE Token Bucket QPS Control

// TELEMETRY

Prometheus & OpenTelemetry Metrics

Expose real-time proxy metrics directly to Prometheus, Datadog, or Grafana via /metrics.

# Sample Prometheus scrape output

opsgimbal_requests_total{provider="anthropic",status="200"} 419280

opsgimbal_requests_total{provider="anthropic",status="429"} 12

opsgimbal_circuit_trips_total{route="llm-inference"} 1

opsgimbal_failover_routed_total{standby="local-gpu"} 12

opsgimbal_p99_latency_seconds{provider="anthropic"} 0.284