This reference architecture describes Enterprise self-host ValGuard in a customer VPC for regulated workloads. Hosted SaaS remains the default for most teams. There is no public Docker image or free local runtime. See Trust and self-host docs.

When to use this layout

Policy requires AI payloads to stay in infrastructure you control.
You already run Postgres and Redis (or approved managed equivalents) in the VPC.
You can operate nginx (or equivalent), TLS, and license heartbeats.

Trust boundaries

flowchart TB
  subgraph vpc [Customer VPC]
    Edge[TLS edge / WAF]
    Web[ValGuard web :3000]
    Proxy[ValGuard proxy :8080]
    PG[(Postgres)]
    RD[(Redis)]
    Edge --> Web
    Edge --> Proxy
    Web --> PG
    Web --> RD
    Proxy --> PG
    Proxy --> RD
    Proxy --> Prov[Your LLM providers]
  end
  Lic[ValGuard license heartbeat]
  Proxy -.->|no AI payloads| Lic

Boundary	What crosses	What must not
App → ValGuard proxy	Prompts, completions, API keys you configure	Unscoped internet egress for secrets
Proxy → providers	Model traffic under your contracts	ValGuard subprocessors for model hosting
Proxy → ValGuard cloud	License heartbeat only	Customer AI content

Secrets

INTERNAL_PROXY_SECRET and vault keys stay in your secret manager / .env on the host.
Provider keys: Provider Vault (encrypted at rest) or BYOK headers from the app.
Rotate with your existing enterprise process; ValGuard does not ship a public secrets broker.

Failure modes

Event	Expected behavior	Owner
Rule block	Fail closed; no tool side effect	Your app routing
Proxy down	Requests fail; no silent skip	Your SRE / fallback policy
Provider 5xx	Surface upstream error; optional client retry	Your app
License invalid	Enforce mode per license docs	Your admin + ValGuard

See fail-closed and Trust.

Latency budget (order of magnitude)

Segment	Typical scale	Notes
Engine packs	microseconds	Rule evaluation
Proxy path	~0.4 ms p50 mocked	Methodology
Model	hundreds of ms	Dominates
Block / re-ask	full buffer	No early tokens

Rollback

Keep previous release under apps/web/.next-releases/ and current pointer.
make web-rebuild-prod cutover or systemctl restart valguard-web / valguard-proxy.
Flip agents to shadow mode if a new pack misbehaves.

SaaS variant

Same logical path without VPC: hosted ValGuard + your providers. Data residency and subprocessors differ. Compare on Trust.

Next step

Read self-host, then contact for Enterprise licensing.