Problems / AI security and governance, medium

One tenant’s loop starves everyone

A multi-tenant agent platform shares one provider key of 4,000 requests a minute. Most tenants run 6-step tasks, 5 a second. One tenant, Acme, has a buggy two-agent loop that runs 40 steps per task, 1.5 tasks a second.

Solve it in the labTake it as a mock interview

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Your goals

Other tenants’ success ≥ 99%.

Test cases

Like a coding problem, a solution has to pass every case, not just the one it was built for. Submit in the lab runs all 6; 2 of them are hidden until then.

  1. As given. The problem’s own traffic, scheduled failures and seed.
  2. Peak hour. 25% more traffic than the problem states, with the same failures.
  3. A slow dependency. The main data store or model answers twice as slowly for part of the run.
  4. A server dies. One replica of the service with the most replicas is killed for part of the run.

The traffic

6.5 requests a second for 60 seconds: 77% tenants (writes), 23% acme (writes).

The system

What each component does in this design, and what calls it. The simulator mimics each one from these settings.

ComponentIts job hereSettings
Load balancerLoad balancerTraffic enters here.Calls Agent API.Layer 4 balancers route by IP and port; layer 7 balancers read HTTP and can route by path or header.–
Agent APIApp serviceLoad balancer forwards to it.Calls Agents (other tenants), Acme’s agents (looping).Little's law: throughput ≈ concurrency ÷ latency. 200 slots at 50 ms serve about 4,000 req/s.3 replicas × 500 slots · timeout 180 s
Agents (other tenants)Agent orchestratorAgent API calls it for /tenants.Calls Model, MCP tool servers.An agent loops: think, call a tool, read the result, repeat until done.400 slots · 6 steps
Acme’s agents (looping)Agent orchestratorAgent API calls it for /acme.Calls Model, MCP tool servers.An agent loops: think, call a tool, read the result, repeat until done.400 slots · 40 steps
ModelLLM endpointAgents (other tenants) calls it. Acme’s agents (looping) calls it.Latency has two parts: time to the first token, then a steady stream of tokens per second.2000 streams · 4,000 calls/min
MCP tool serversTool / MCP serverAgents (other tenants) calls it. Acme’s agents (looping) calls it.Tools give the model actions such as search or database queries; each call is another round trip.2000 slots

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