Well-Lit Paths
Well-lit paths are curated, end-to-end guides for common LLM inference patterns and optimizations. These guides are intended to be a starting point for your own configuration and deployment of model servers. Our manifests provide basic reusable building blocks for vLLM deployments and llm-d router configuration within these guides but are not intended to support the full range of all possible configurations.
Intelligent Routing
- Optimized Baseline: Strategies for handling the unique challenges of LLM request scheduling, moving beyond traditional round-robin approaches.
- Predicted Latency-Based Routing: Using online-trained machine learning models to predict latency and optimize scheduling.
Advanced KV-Cache Management
- Precise Prefix Cache Routing: Near-real-time routing based on exact cache state published by model servers.
- Tiered Prefix Cache: Efficiently managing KV caches by offloading to CPU RAM, NVMe, or network storage to improve prefix-cache re-use.
Serving Large Models
- Prefill/Decode Disaggregation: Separating prefill (compute-bound) and decode (memory-bandwidth-bound) phases for optimized performance.
- Wide Expert-Parallelism: Scaling KV cache space for massive MoE models like DeepSeek-R1 using DP/EP deployment patterns.
Operational Excellence
- Flow Control: Intelligent request queuing for multi-tenant deployments and managing traffic spikes.
- Workload Autoscaling: From simple Kubernetes autoscaling supplemented by EPP load metrics to advanced, SLO-aware capacity optimization for heterogeneous pools via the Workload Variant Autoscaler.
Experimental
- Asynchronous Processing: Intelligently processing latency-tolerant requests sourced from message queues via a lightweight agent to leverage "slack" capacity without the complexity of a full batch gateway.
- Batch Gateway: Managing large-scale batch inference coexisting with interactive workloads via an OpenAI-compatible Batch API.