Description
Build a solid understanding of the current landscape of Artificial Intelligence and how modern cloud-native technologies—especially Kubernetes—support AI workloads.
Goals
Use Gemini Learning Mode to guide the exploration, surface relevant concepts, and structure the learning journey:
- Gain insight into the latest AI trends, tools, and architectural concepts.
- Understand how Kubernetes and related cloud-native technologies are used in the AI ecosystem (model training, deployment, orchestration, MLOps).
Resources
Red Hat AI Topic Articles
- https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/ai
Kubeflow Documentation
- https://www.kubeflow.org/docs/
Q4 2025 CNCF Technology Landscape Radar report:
- https://www.cncf.io/announcements/2025/11/11/cncf-and-slashdata-report-finds-leading-ai-tools-gaining-adoption-in-cloud-native-ecosystems/
- https://www.cncf.io/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/cncfreporttechradar_111025a.pdf
Agent-to-Agent (A2A) Protocol
- https://developers.googleblog.com/en/a2a-a-new-era-of-agent-interoperability/
Looking for hackers with the skills:
This project is part of:
Hack Week 25
Activity
Comments
-
about 1 month ago by jluo | Reply
A great summary from Gemini:
This is a rapidly expanding ecosystem. To keep it organized, I will break this list down by Lifecycle Stage (Training vs. Serving) and Infrastructure Layer (Compute vs. Data).
1. AI Platforms & Orchestration (The "Command Center")
These tools manage the end-to-end lifecycle, gluing everything else together.
- Kubeflow: The "Grandfather" of AI on K8s. It’s a massive suite including:
- Kubeflow Pipelines: For building repeatable workflows (Data -> Train -> Deploy).
- Kubeflow Notebooks: Spawns Jupyter servers as Pods for data scientists.
- Katib: Automated hyperparameter tuning (finding the best learning rate).
- Ray (KubeRay): The top challenger to Kubeflow. It allows you to write Python code that scales across a cluster instantly. It is excellent for both distributed training and serving.
- ZenML: An MLOps framework that sits above the infrastructure, letting you define pipelines in code that can run on Kubeflow, Ray, or simple Kubernetes batches.
2. Training & Scheduling (The "Heavy Lifters")
Standard Kubernetes scheduling (FIFO) is bad for AI training. These tools fix that.
- Volcano: A batch scheduler. It ensures "Gang Scheduling"—meaning if a job needs 50 GPUs but only 49 are available, it waits. (Standard K8s would start 49 and let them sit idle, wasting money).
- Kueue: A newer, lighter alternative to Volcano managed by the K8s specialized interest group. It manages "Job Queues" natively.
- Training Operator: A unified K8s operator that lets you run
PyTorchJob,TFJob(TensorFlow), andXGBoostJobas native K8s objects.
3. Inference & Serving (The "Waiter")
Once a model is trained, these tools serve it to users.
- KServe: The industry standard. It handles "Scale-to-Zero" (via KEDA), canary rollouts, and provides a unified API for TensorFlow, PyTorch, and ONNX models.
- vLLM: The current king of LLM serving. It is highly optimized for GPU memory (PagedAttention) and is often run inside KServe or as a standalone Deployment.
- BentoML / Yatai: A developer-friendly framework. You package your model as a "Bento" (standard format), and Yatai orchestrates the deployment on K8s.
- Seldon Core: An enterprise-grade alternative to KServe with advanced features for compliance, audit trails, and complex inference graphs.
4. Agentic & LLM Ops (The "New Wave")
Tools specifically for the 2025 era of Autonomous Agents.
- LangFlow / Flowise: Low-code "drag-and-drop" UI tools for building LLM chains. They can be deployed on K8s via Helm charts to run agent backends.
- kagent / Agent Sandbox: Emerging tools (often cloud-specific or experimental) that provide secure, isolated environments (using gVisor or microVMs) for agents to execute code safely.
- Ollama: While often used locally, it is increasingly deployed on K8s (via Helm) as a lightweight way to serve open-source models like Llama 3 or Mistral inside a cluster.
5. Data & Memory (The "Brain")
- Vector Databases (with K8s Operators):
- Milvus: A popular open-source vector DB built natively for K8s scalability.
- Weaviate: Another strong option with a solid K8s operator.
- Qdrant: Written in Rust, very fast, and easy to deploy on K8s.
- Feature Stores:
- Feast: The open-source standard for serving features (e.g., "User's last 5 clicks") to models in real-time.
6. Observability & Cost (The "Watchtower")
- Prometheus & Grafana: The standard for metrics (GPU temperature, Request Latency).
- DCGM Exporter: The specific NVIDIA tool that pulls GPU metrics (utilization, memory) so Prometheus can see them.
- KEDA: The autoscaler (discussed previously) that scales pods based on event queues.
- Karpenter: The Node autoscaler. If KEDA asks for more pods, Karpenter instantly buys more EC2/VM nodes from the cloud provider to fit them.
- OpenCost / Kubecost: Tools to track exactly how much money your AI team is spending on GPUs per namespace.
- Kubeflow: The "Grandfather" of AI on K8s. It’s a massive suite including:
-
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The Agentic Rancher Experiment: Do Androids Dream of Electric Cattle? by moio
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Self-Scaling LLM Infrastructure Powered by Rancher by ademicev0
Self-Scaling LLM Infrastructure Powered by Rancher

Description
The Problem
Running LLMs can get expensive and complex pretty quickly.
Today there are typically two choices:
- Use cloud APIs like OpenAI or Anthropic. Easy to start with, but costs add up at scale.
- Self-host everything - set up Kubernetes, figure out GPU scheduling, handle scaling, manage model serving... it's a lot of work.
What if there was a middle ground?
What if infrastructure scaled itself instead of making you scale it?
Can we use existing Rancher capabilities like CAPI, autoscaling, and GitOps to make this simpler instead of building everything from scratch?
Project Repository: github.com/alexander-demicev/llmserverless
What This Project Does
A key feature is hybrid deployment: requests can be routed based on complexity or privacy needs. Simple or low-sensitivity queries can use public APIs (like OpenAI), while complex or private requests are handled in-house on local infrastructure. This flexibility allows balancing cost, privacy, and performance - using cloud for routine tasks and on-premises resources for sensitive or demanding workloads.
A complete, self-scaling LLM infrastructure that:
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- Scales up automatically when requests come in
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- Runs on any infrastructure - laptop, bare metal, or cloud
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How It Works
A combination of open source tools working together:
Flow:
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Description
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The pipeline will automate the lifecycle of a machine learning model, including:
- Data ingestion/collection
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- Model artifact storage in an S3-compatible registry (e.g. Minio)
- A Go-based deployment controller that automatically deploys new model versions to Kubernetes using Rancher
- A lightweight inference service that loads and serves the latest model
- Monitoring of model performance and service health through Prometheus/Grafana
The outcome is a working prototype of an MLOps workflow that demonstrates how AI workloads can be trained, versioned, deployed, and monitored using the Kubernetes ecosystem.
Goals
By the end of Hack Week, the project should:
Produce a fully functional ML pipeline running on Kubernetes with:
- Data collection job
- Training job container
- Storage and versioning of trained models
- Automated deployment of new model versions
- Model inference API service
- Basic monitoring dashboards
Showcase a Go-based deployment automation component, which scans the model registry and automatically generates & applies Kubernetes manifests for new model versions.
Enable continuous improvement by making the system modular and extensible (e.g., additional models, metrics, autoscaling, or drift detection can be added later).
Prepare a short demo explaining the end-to-end process and how new models flow through the system.
Resources
Updates
- Training pipeline and datasets
- Inference Service py
A CLI for Harvester by mohamed.belgaied
Harvester does not officially come with a CLI tool, the user is supposed to interact with Harvester mostly through the UI. Though it is theoretically possible to use kubectl to interact with Harvester, the manipulation of Kubevirt YAML objects is absolutely not user friendly. Inspired by tools like multipass from Canonical to easily and rapidly create one of multiple VMs, I began the development of Harvester CLI. Currently, it works but Harvester CLI needs some love to be up-to-date with Harvester v1.0.2 and needs some bug fixes and improvements as well.
Project Description
Harvester CLI is a command line interface tool written in Go, designed to simplify interfacing with a Harvester cluster as a user. It is especially useful for testing purposes as you can easily and rapidly create VMs in Harvester by providing a simple command such as:
harvester vm create my-vm --count 5
to create 5 VMs named my-vm-01 to my-vm-05.
Harvester CLI is functional but needs a number of improvements: up-to-date functionality with Harvester v1.0.2 (some minor issues right now), modifying the default behaviour to create an opensuse VM instead of an ubuntu VM, solve some bugs, etc.
Github Repo for Harvester CLI: https://github.com/belgaied2/harvester-cli
Done in previous Hackweeks
- Create a Github actions pipeline to automatically integrate Harvester CLI to Homebrew repositories: DONE
- Automatically package Harvester CLI for OpenSUSE / Redhat RPMs or DEBs: DONE
Goal for this Hackweek
The goal for this Hackweek is to bring Harvester CLI up-to-speed with latest Harvester versions (v1.3.X and v1.4.X), and improve the code quality as well as implement some simple features and bug fixes.
Some nice additions might be: * Improve handling of namespaced objects * Add features, such as network management or Load Balancer creation ? * Add more unit tests and, why not, e2e tests * Improve CI * Improve the overall code quality * Test the program and create issues for it
Issue list is here: https://github.com/belgaied2/harvester-cli/issues
Resources
The project is written in Go, and using client-go the Kubernetes Go Client libraries to communicate with the Harvester API (which is Kubernetes in fact).
Welcome contributions are:
- Testing it and creating issues
- Documentation
- Go code improvement
What you might learn
Harvester CLI might be interesting to you if you want to learn more about:
- GitHub Actions
- Harvester as a SUSE Product
- Go programming language
- Kubernetes API
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Kubernetes-Based ML Lifecycle Automation by lmiranda
Description
This project aims to build a complete end-to-end Machine Learning pipeline running entirely on Kubernetes, using Go, and containerized ML components.
The pipeline will automate the lifecycle of a machine learning model, including:
- Data ingestion/collection
- Model training as a Kubernetes Job
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- Monitoring of model performance and service health through Prometheus/Grafana
The outcome is a working prototype of an MLOps workflow that demonstrates how AI workloads can be trained, versioned, deployed, and monitored using the Kubernetes ecosystem.
Goals
By the end of Hack Week, the project should:
Produce a fully functional ML pipeline running on Kubernetes with:
- Data collection job
- Training job container
- Storage and versioning of trained models
- Automated deployment of new model versions
- Model inference API service
- Basic monitoring dashboards
Showcase a Go-based deployment automation component, which scans the model registry and automatically generates & applies Kubernetes manifests for new model versions.
Enable continuous improvement by making the system modular and extensible (e.g., additional models, metrics, autoscaling, or drift detection can be added later).
Prepare a short demo explaining the end-to-end process and how new models flow through the system.
Resources
Updates
- Training pipeline and datasets
- Inference Service py
