TechnicalJanuary 12, 202610 min read

Inside the Eval Gate: Real-Time AI Action Verification

SOVR Engineering
SOVR.AI

The Eval Gate: Your AI's Checkpoint


Every action an AI attempts passes through the Eval Gate. This isn't a bottleneck—it's a guarantee. In milliseconds, we determine whether an action should proceed, require approval, or be blocked.


Performance Requirements


  • **Latency**: < 20ms p99
  • **Throughput**: 100,000+ evaluations/second
  • **Availability**: 99.99% uptime
  • **Consistency**: Strong consistency for policy enforcement

  • Architecture Overview


    ┌─────────────┐ ┌─────────────┐ ┌─────────────┐

    │ AI Agent │────▶│ Eval Gate │────▶│ Execution │

    └─────────────┘ └─────────────┘ └─────────────┘

    ┌──────┴──────┐

    ▼ ▼

    ┌─────────┐ ┌─────────┐

    │ Policy │ │ Audit │

    │ Store │ │ Log │

    └─────────┘ └─────────┘


    Evaluation Pipeline


    Stage 1: Request Parsing

  • Extract action type, resource, context
  • Normalize to canonical format
  • Validate request structure

  • Stage 2: Policy Resolution

  • Identify applicable policies
  • Resolve inheritance chains
  • Merge rule sets

  • Stage 3: Rule Evaluation

  • Match action against rules
  • Evaluate conditions
  • Calculate risk score

  • Stage 4: Decision

  • ALLOW: Action proceeds
  • DENY: Action blocked
  • REQUIRE_APPROVAL: Queued for human review

  • Stage 5: Audit

  • Log decision with full context
  • Update metrics
  • Trigger alerts if configured

  • Optimization Techniques


    Policy Caching

    Hot policies cached in memory with sub-millisecond access.


    Rule Indexing

    Actions mapped to relevant rules via inverted index.


    Parallel Evaluation

    Independent rules evaluated concurrently.


    Early Exit

    DENY rules short-circuit remaining evaluation.


    Failure Modes



    Monitoring


    Key metrics we track:

  • Evaluation latency (p50, p95, p99)
  • Decision distribution (allow/deny/approval)
  • Policy cache hit rate
  • Error rate by type

  • View Live Metrics →


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