Consolidate default LLM model names into a single MIT source of truth

Problem

Default LLM model names live in two places that rot independently, and a retirement in either silently breaks deploys:

• AWS/GCP — the CLI resolves the alias → concrete model ID statically in src/pkg/cli/compose/fixup.go configureAccessGateway (chat-default → us.amazon.nova-2-lite-v1:0 / gemini-2.5-flash).
• Azure — pulumi-defang picks from a hardcoded chatPreference list in provider/defangazure/azure/models.go.

This just bit us: Azure's gpt-4o 2024-11-20 entered Deprecating, and defang up on Azure failed with 400 ServiceModelDeprecating. Fixed in pulumi-defang#376, but the fix only patched the Azure list — the two sources of truth remain separate.

Why the two resolution mechanisms must stay different (don't unify the code)

	AWS / GCP	Azure
Model hosting	Serverless (Bedrock / Vertex) — a model ID is just a string; IAM is model-agnostic	Must be provisioned as an ARM cognitiveservices.Deployment
Resolution	Compile-time, in the CLI (no cloud creds needed)	Deploy-time, in the CD task (queries Accounts_ListModels per account+region)

• "Do it in the CLI for all providers" regresses Azure: the CLI runs before the CD task with no Azure creds and can't know what's deployable in the user's account/region — exactly the blind spot that caused this incident.
• "Do it in Pulumi for all providers" over-complicates serverless AWS/GCP (adds needless deploy-time catalog queries) and re-plumbs the LiteLLM --model command path.

Proposal: consolidate the data, not the code

Make a single declarative table the source of truth:

{provider, role} → ordered preferred model name(s) + format

• CLI (AWS/GCP) reads the single top entry and resolves statically as it does today.
• pulumi-defang (Azure) reads the ordered list as its chatPreference/embeddingPreference seed and keeps the deploy-time lifecycle filter from #376 as defense-in-depth (availability is per-account/region; a static list can never be sufficient on Azure alone).

One edit updates every cloud; each provider keeps the resolution mechanism it actually needs.

Where it must live (licensing)

• pulumi-defang = AGPL-3.0 (viral), defang CLI = MIT.
• AGPL may depend on MIT; MIT may not depend on AGPL (it would relicense the CLI).
• ∴ the shared table must be hosted in the CLI (MIT) module (github.com/DefangLabs/defang/src/...) and imported by pulumi-defang — never the reverse.

This is a natural home: the alias vocabulary (chat-default, embedding-default) already lives in the CLI, and the CLI already owns AWS/GCP defaults. The CLI becomes the canonical data owner for all providers even though it doesn't itself deploy Azure.

Sketch

• Add a leaf package, e.g. src/pkg/cli/compose/models (minimal transitive deps, so pulumi-defang doesn't inherit the CLI's dependency graph), exporting the table.
• fixup.go configureAccessGateway reads AWS/GCP entries from it.
• pulumi-defang adds require github.com/DefangLabs/defang/src and seeds the Azure selector from the table.
• Keep the user-facing alias stable so defang up output is unchanged while the concrete model updates underneath.

Optional follow-up (not required for v1)

Promote the table to Fabric so defaults update via control-plane config without a CLI or CD-image release — this incident required a CD-image rollout to fix. Adds a network hop and new Fabric surface; do it only if release-free updates become a priority.

Non-goals

• Don't unify the resolution code paths.
• Don't couple defaults to per-model IAM allowlists (BYOC IAM stays model-agnostic; the Playground GCP :predict allowlist in defang-mvp is a cautionary example, not a pattern to copy).

Acceptance criteria

• Single declarative default-model table in the CLI (MIT) module.
• CLI AWS/GCP resolution reads from it (behavior unchanged).
• pulumi-defang Azure selector seeds from it and retains the lifecycle filter.
• Updating a default model is a one-line change in one place.
• Dependency direction is pulumi-defang → defang only.

Context captured from the model-consolidation investigation; see pulumi-defang#376 for the Azure lifecycle fix that motivated this.

Start with src/pkg/cli/compose/fixup.go and its configureAccessGateway function, then compare the Azure chatPreference and embeddingPreference handling in pulumi-defang's provider/defangazure/azure/models.go and the lifecycle filter from pulumi-defang#376. Done means the MIT CLI module owns one declarative table, AWS/GCP resolution reads it, Azure seeds from it while retaining deploy-time filtering, and dependency direction remains pulumi-defang → defang.