OpenAI-compatible serving boundary

The first public serving surface is a deliberately small, tested subset of POST /v1/chat/completions. Compatibility is an ingress/egress concern; HTTP, JSON, chat templates, and tokenization do not enter the cluster router or GPU worker state machines.

OpenAI JSON -> chat template/tokenizer -> generation request -> cluster router
     ^                                                        |
     +---- JSON response or SSE chunks <- fenced deliveries <-+

Initial contract

Accepted request fields are:

• model;
• nonempty text messages with system, developer, user, or assistant roles;
• max_completion_tokens, with max_tokens accepted as an alias;
• stream and stream_options.include_usage;
• temperature, top_p, stop, and seed.

Known fields with unsupported values produce an OpenAI-shaped invalid_request_error. Additional fields are currently ignored and must not be advertised as implemented. Tool calls, structured outputs, multimodal content, log probabilities, and the Responses API are later compatibility slices.

pretrained.openai/normalize-chat-request accepts injected model resolution and chat tokenization, returning the ordinary continuation generation-request. The controller therefore has no dependency on OpenAI JSON.

Streaming safety

Each generated token carries its assignment id and a zero-based index through the worker wire protocol. Both worker and router accept only the next index for the active assignment. This fences duplicate, stale, reordered, and late messages.

Before any token reaches the consumer, offer failure or worker loss can select a new candidate. After the first delta, transparent retry is unsafe because a new worker could duplicate or diverge from already visible output. The current contract closes the stream with an error. A future retryable stream must first publish or transfer an exact continuation at the last delivered token boundary.

HTTP adapter

pretrained.openai.server is available with the :openai-server alias and the Replikativ HTTP-kit distribution. It:

1. exposes chat completions and configured model ids;
2. emits text/event-stream frames ending in data: [DONE];
3. aggregates terminal tokens for non-streamed responses;
4. cancels the controller request when the client disconnects;
5. bounds each client's application queue and observes HTTP-kit's queued-byte high/low watermarks, keeping a slow socket off controller and decoder loops;
6. configures a hard per-connection queued-byte ceiling;
7. returns OpenAI-shaped JSON errors with appropriate HTTP status codes.

Terminal usage reports the actual reusable KV prefix as usage.prompt_tokens_details.cached_tokens. The worker records the count returned by restore, rather than the router's potentially stale cache estimate, and carries it through the assignment-fenced terminal result.

Integration tests exercise model listing, streamed and non-streamed chat, usage, errors, and disconnect cancellation over a real TCP listener. The same surface has been exercised with the Python openai 2.21.0 client for model listing, non-streamed completion, streamed deltas, and streamed usage with only base_url redirected:

from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI(base_url="http://127.0.0.1:8080/v1", api_key="local")
result = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="gemma-3-270m-it",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Explain KV caching briefly."}],
    stream=True,
    stream_options={"include_usage": True},
)

for chunk in result:
    if chunk.choices:
        print(chunk.choices[0].delta.content or "", end="", flush=True)

The placeholder API key satisfies the client constructor; the embedded server does not currently authenticate it.

Cluster composition

pretrained.openai.cluster/open-server owns the lifecycle wiring between HTTP ingress and a Datahike-backed Kabel router. Worker sockets attach through its router-middleware; only control messages and token results cross Kabel, while KV chunks remain on the Konserve placement path. The model-free live showcase runs two actual worker WebSockets behind one HTTP/SSE listener:

;; clojure -M:distributed-demo
(require '[pretrained.continuation-kabel-demo :as demo])
(demo/run-openai-live-simulation)
;; => {:http-status 200, :selected-worker :fast-gpu,
;;     :text "<101><102>", :cached-token-count 0, ...}

Its opt-in regression test is:

clojure -M:test:distributed-demo:distributed-test -d test-distributed

Authentication, quotas, TLS termination, and production rate limiting belong at the deployment boundary and are not part of the first embedded server.