Budgets, caps and policies
Distinguish spend visibility from configured runtime enforcement in Kadryn.
Budgets, alerts, caps and policies do not mean the same thing. Keep visibility and runtime enforcement separate.
Can a budget block spend?
Budgets help monitor AI spend against configured thresholds. A budget is not a hard cap.
Budget ownership, approvals and other governance capabilities can be plan-scoped. Their presence does not change the meaning of a budget into request blocking.
Does an alert block requests?
Alerts surface configured conditions. An alert does not by itself block a request.
An alert can inform a decision or workflow without acting as the runtime enforcement mechanism.
What can actively enforce a limit?
Configured caps and policies can enforce limits on the relevant Gateway control path. Active enforcement is conditional on the applicable product capability and runtime configuration.
Use Gateway-based caps and policies where active runtime enforcement is configured.
What is the Direct Ingest boundary?
Direct Ingest supports observation and enrichment without routing all production traffic through Kadryn. It is not inline runtime enforcement.
See Gateway vs Direct Ingest for the implementation-mode boundary.
Safe interpretation
- Budget = visibility against configured thresholds, not a hard cap.
- Alert = surfaced condition, not blocking by itself.
- Cap/policy = enforceable control only on the relevant configured runtime path.
- Direct Ingest = observation/enrichment, not runtime blocking.
- Gateway = conditional control path, not a mandatory product architecture.