Glossary

Key terms used throughout this documentation. For the conceptual model behind them, see Key concepts and the Multi-tenancy model.

Term	Meaning
Organization	The top tenant boundary — a customer or business unit. The isolation, billing, and SSO boundary.
Project	A workspace within an organization. Providers, routing, guardrails, and budgets are configured per project.
Group	A set of users within a project, used for shared limits and model allow-lists.
User / Consumer	An identity that makes requests, expressed as the tuple organization.project.user.
Consumer tuple	The three-part identity (org.project.user) that keys API keys, budgets, usage, and isolation.
Platform admin	Role spanning all organizations.
Org admin	Role confined to one organization.
Member	Read-only, self-service role for an individual user.
Control plane	The configuration service (backed by PostgreSQL) that is the single source of truth.
Data plane	The gateway that handles live traffic and enforces policy. Holds no configuration of its own.
Reconcile	The continuous projection of the control plane's desired state onto the data plane.
Logical model name	A stable name developers call (e.g. coding-default), mapped to a real provider model by routing.
Provider	An upstream LLM endpoint (OpenAI-compatible) configured per project.
Routing	The mapping of logical model names to providers and real model IDs.
Budget	A USD spending cap at organization, project, group, or user scope; the tightest applicable cap wins.
Limit	A rate cap (tokens per minute) at a tenancy scope.
Guardrail	A request-content control — prompt-injection detection and PII masking.
Semantic cache	A response cache keyed by meaning, so similar prompts reuse a prior answer and avoid upstream spend.
Semantic guard	An embedding-based prompt-safety classifier, tunable per project with sample prompts.
MCP	Model Context Protocol — the standard for giving AI agents access to external tools.
MCP server	A backend tool endpoint registered per project and fronted by the gateway.
Gate	A policy stage in the request lifecycle (key-auth, guardrails, routing, budget/limits, cache).
Key-auth	The gate that authenticates an API key and resolves the consumer identity.
Tenant guard	The check that a request may only reach its own tenant's resources.
IdP brokering	Connecting an organization's own identity provider so users sign in with corporate credentials.
JIT provisioning	Creating a user account automatically on first successful sign-in.
Audit log	The record of every mutating administrative action, including denied attempts.
Component matrix	The set of component versions tested together for a given product release.
Build-once / promote-by-retag	Shipping the exact tested image digest to production by retagging, not rebuilding.
Air-gap	Running with no internet egress — images mirrored, TLS internal, identity in-cluster.

Next steps

• Key concepts — the model these terms describe.
• Multi-tenancy model — organizations, projects, groups, users.