This is really interesting. For SOTA inference systems, I've seen two general approaches:
* The "stack-centric" approach such as vLLM production stack, AIBrix, etc. These set up an entire inference stack for you including KV cache, routing, etc.
* The "pipeline-centric" approach such as NVidia Dynamo, Ray, BentoML. These give you more of an SDK so you can define inference pipelines that you can then deploy on your specific hardware.
It seems like LLM-d is the former. Is that right? What prompted you to go down that direction, instead of the direction of Dynamo?
It sounds like you might be confusing different parts of the stack. NVIDIA Dynamo for example supports vLLM as the inference engine. I think you should think of something like vLLM as more akin to GUnicorn, and llm-d as an application load balancer. And I guess something like NVIDIA Dynamo would be like Django.
1. Balance / schedule incoming requests to the right backend
2. Model server replicas that can run on multiple hardware topologies
3. Prefix caching hierarchy with well-tested variants for different use cases
So it's a 3-tier architecture. The biggest difference with Dynamo is that llm-d is using the inference gateway extension - https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/gateway-api-inference-ext... - which brings Kubernetes owned APIs for managing model routing, request priority and flow control, LoRA support etc.
In this analogy, Dynamo is most definitely not like Django. It includes inference aware routing, KV caching, etc. -- all the stuff you would need to run a modern SOTA inference stack.
This project appears to make use of both vLLM and Inference Gateway (an official Kubernetes extension to the Gateway resource). The contributions of llm-d itself seems to mostly be a scheduling algorithm for load balancing across vLLM instances.
llm-d would make sense if you are running a very large production LLM serving setup - say 5+ full H100 hosts. The aim is to be much more focused than kserve is on exactly the needs of serving LLMs. It would of course be possible to run alongside kserve, but the user we are targeting is not typically a kserve deployer today.
Do you think https://github.com/openai/CLIP can be ran on it? LLM makes me think of chatbots but I suppose because it's inference-based it would work. Somewhat unclear on what's the difference between LLMs and inference, I think inference is the type of compute LLMs use.
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* The "stack-centric" approach such as vLLM production stack, AIBrix, etc. These set up an entire inference stack for you including KV cache, routing, etc.
* The "pipeline-centric" approach such as NVidia Dynamo, Ray, BentoML. These give you more of an SDK so you can define inference pipelines that you can then deploy on your specific hardware.
It seems like LLM-d is the former. Is that right? What prompted you to go down that direction, instead of the direction of Dynamo?
1. Balance / schedule incoming requests to the right backend
2. Model server replicas that can run on multiple hardware topologies
3. Prefix caching hierarchy with well-tested variants for different use cases
So it's a 3-tier architecture. The biggest difference with Dynamo is that llm-d is using the inference gateway extension - https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/gateway-api-inference-ext... - which brings Kubernetes owned APIs for managing model routing, request priority and flow control, LoRA support etc.
We plan to publish examples of multi-host inference that leverages LeaderWorkerSets - https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/lws - which helps run ranked serving workloads across hosts. LeaderWorkerSet is how Google supports both TPU and GPU multi-host deployments - see https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/lws/blob/main/config/samp... for an example.
Edit: Here is an example Kubernetes configuration running DeepSeek-R1 on vLLM multi-host using LeaderWorkerSet https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/wg-serving/blob/main/serv.... This work would be integrated into llm-d.
This project appears to make use of both vLLM and Inference Gateway (an official Kubernetes extension to the Gateway resource). The contributions of llm-d itself seems to mostly be a scheduling algorithm for load balancing across vLLM instances.
I wonder if inference-d would be a fitting name.
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