DVARA 1.6.0 — Community Edition, now public

DVARA 1.6.0 is available today, and with it the free Community Edition is genuinely ready to use. Over the last few releases we introduced a Community Edition, then made it a real standalone image with none of the paid code inside — and now made it something a stranger can pull, run in five minutes, evaluate, and trust. This post is the whole Community Edition story in one place.

Two editions, one download away

There is no separate Community build to hunt for. DVARA decides the edition at startup:

• A valid, signature-verified license → Enterprise Edition. The full governance graph activates.
• No license, an invalid one, or one expired beyond its 14-day grace → Community Edition. The gateway boots and passes traffic on the Community feature set instead of failing to start.

The current edition is reported as edition (COMMUNITY / ENTERPRISE) on /actuator/gateway-status, so an operator can always confirm which one is running.

What is new is that the free image is now genuinely free of the paid code. The public dvara-llm-gateway and dvara-flightdeck images are a slim build that leaves out every paid Enterprise engine — policy, FinOps, signed audit, SSO and security, advanced routing, agentic, and cache. A security team evaluating Community Edition is no longer, byte-for-byte, holding the enterprise code. The full Enterprise build ships as separate private images (dvara-llm-gateway-ee, dvara-flightdeck-ee), and the runtime license still gates Enterprise on those.

One thing that does not change by edition: Postgres is required for every edition. Community Edition is a persistent, single-environment deployment — not an in-memory or dev-only mode.

What Community Edition includes

The whole LLM gateway, unrestricted:

• The OpenAI-compatible surface — /v1/chat/completions, /completions, /responses, /embeddings, /models, /batches, /files
• 15+ providers, provider switching by model string, default fallback, and the resilience layer (circuit breakers, retries)
• API-key authentication with tenant plumbing, request and access logging
• Raw token-usage metering, Prometheus/Micrometer metrics
• The Console, with built-in username/password login and RBAC roles

On top of that, four scaled-down governance features so a free install shows what governance actually feels like rather than being a bare proxy:

• Static model allow/deny list — a single list, no policy DSL and no dry-run. A blocked model returns POLICY_DENIED.
• Local request log — who, when, which model, how many tokens, viewable in the Console, retained about 7 days. It is unsigned: no HMAC, no hash chain, no SIEM export.
• Regex-only PII detection — the built-in patterns (SSN, checksum-validated card numbers), with log or block as the action. No redaction, no tokenization.
• Read-only cost estimate — per-model spend visibility. No budgets, no caps, no enforcement.

Where the line is

	Community	Enterprise
LLM gateway, providers, routing, fallback, Console	Full	Full
Policy	Static model allow/deny list	Policy-as-code — DSL, versioning, dry-run, shadow, conflict detection
Audit	Local, unsigned, ~7-day	Tamper-evident HMAC hash chain, unlimited retention, SIEM export, compliance reports
PII	Regex detect → log or block	Presidio/GLiNER + composite detection, redaction, reversible tokenization
Cost	Read-only estimate	Budgets, hard caps, per-call gate, chargeback, forecast, model downgrade
MCP governance plane	—	Full governed tool chain
A2A governance plane	—	Full governed hop
SSO, real rate limiting, semantic cache, advanced routing, Vault/mTLS	—	Included

The shape of that split is deliberate. In Community Edition you can see your traffic, catch an obvious SSN, and block an expensive model — enough to feel what governance does. What you cannot do is prove any of it to an auditor, enforce it richly, or protect the data itself. Those are the things a regulated production deployment actually needs, and they are what Enterprise Edition is for.

Start in five minutes

A single docker run of the public Community Edition image — no API key, no license — takes you from nothing to a first governed request, verified against the published image. A second step shows governance actually doing something: the Community deny-list teaser blocks a request with POLICY_DENIED, so the first thing a new user sees is a policy firing, not a bare proxy. The quickstart walks the whole path, including how to upgrade to Enterprise later.

A trust surface for a closed-source product

Community Edition is free, but not open source — DVARA does not publish its source. So 1.6.0 ships the instruments that stand in place of source access:

• A responsible-disclosure process (SECURITY.md with a coordinated-disclosure SLA, safe harbor, and scope) and a /.well-known/security.txt.
• A public third-party penetration-test engagement scope.
• A /trust page that pulls it together.

If you cannot read the code, you can at least see how vulnerabilities are handled and who has looked.

Opt-in usage telemetry. Community Edition can now send a small usage signal — off by default, and Community-Edition only. A licensed or air-gapped install never sends anything, and not because a switch is set the right way: the telemetry simply isn't active outside Community Edition. When you turn it on, five non-sensitive fields leave the box: an anonymous install id, the edition, the version, a coarse request-volume bucket (a range, never an exact count), and a timestamp. Nothing else — no prompts, no responses, no PII, no provider or model names. The full payload is documented field-by-field, so you can see exactly what would be sent before enabling it.

No lock-in

Community Edition changes what happens when a paid license lapses, and it is worth being precise.

An Enterprise license that expires gets a 14-day grace period, fully operational, with warning headers and audit events. After the grace period the data plane returns 402 LICENSE_EXPIRED — administrative reads stay available so an operator can still diagnose and export configuration. That block is intentional: a paid product should be able to stop on non-payment.

What Community Edition adds is a floor beneath it. An operator who does not want to renew can drop to the free edition and keep running — free and unblocked, at the Community feature set. So the honest promise is not "Enterprise never stops." It is you can always fall back to the free edition and keep serving traffic.

Turning on Enterprise

Because the public base-name images are now slim Community Edition, turning on Enterprise is a re-image, not a key-swap. Running Enterprise means pulling the private -ee image with a customer registry credential (docker login ghcr.io) and applying a license. Concretely, moving from a free install to a paid one:

• Point your deployment at dvara-llm-gateway-ee / dvara-flightdeck-ee instead of the public names.
• Add an imagePullSecret (or docker login) for the private registry.
• Apply your license as before.

Existing Enterprise deployments that already pull a full image and apply a license are unaffected — this only changes the base-name images.

Also in 1.6.0 — signed Agent Cards on the A2A plane

Alongside the Community Edition work, the agent-to-agent governance plane gets the piece everything downstream depends on: knowing a peer agent is who it claims to be.

When DVARA discovers a peer agent, it now verifies the cryptographic signature on that agent's Agent Card, following the A2A specification's signed-card format. It surfaces a trust state — VERIFIED, SELF_SIGNED, UNSIGNED, or INVALID — on the served card, in the agent registry, and on the discovery audit event, and it enforces it: a signature that fails against the operator-pinned key is rejected outright, and a strict mode (require-signed-cards) refuses anything that is not fully VERIFIED. By default it is fail-soft, so you can adopt it without breaking existing peers. The operator-pinned public key on each agent — set through the Automation API or the Console, with a trust badge on the A2A agents page — is the trust anchor the delegation chain will build on in 1.7.0.

1.6.0 also freezes the design for cryptographic delegation: a signed delegation chain with strict scope-subset attenuation, where a delegated token can only ever narrow authority, never widen it. And two quiet correctness gaps are fixed — skill-scoped policy rules and approval.required-skills now actually govern A2A hops, and a peer-supplied context id is now recorded in per-hop metering instead of coming through empty.

Upgrade

1.6.0 is a plain version bump over 1.5.0 — same image names, same public/private split, same registry model. Pull the 1.6.0 images (or the oci://ghcr.io/dvarahq/charts/dvara:1.6.0 chart), keep your license and configuration, and roll.

If you are new to DVARA: it is self-managed, activated by a signed license key, with bring-your-own-key credentials so provider keys and request data never leave your perimeter. Start free with the public Community Edition quickstart, or get a 30-day, all-features trial license — every feature unlocked, including the MCP and A2A planes. See the editions or, for production licensing or a managed deployment in your region, talk to us.