
Episode #8
Disaggregated Inference on Kubernetes
Every LLM inference request splits into two phases with completely different hardware profiles: pre-fill and decode. But most Kubernetes clusters still run them on the same pod. Morgan Foster, who works on the llm-d project and the AI Gateway Working Group out of Red Hat's Office of the CTO, joins William Morgan to explain what that means. Foster and Morgan get into why real-time inference workloads fit the primitives Kubernetes already has, while training often runs on Slurm instead. They walk through disaggregated inference: how pre-fill and decode get scheduled on separate pods, how KV cache blocks move between them over RDMA, and what happens today when a pre-fill or decode pod dies mid-request (nothing handles the failover cleanly, and the computed KV blocks just get thrown away). They also cover why faster token generation buys agentic systems more capability, not just quicker responses, and why Kubernetes proxies, built around header-based ingress routing, are struggling to govern AI traffic that depends on streamed JSON request bodies and inference happening outside the cluster. FIND AND FOLLOW US ON: ✦ Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4LLTNjMbd7wNCYhSI9pkQU?nd=1&dlsi=3baba6bcc6b44cae ✦ Apple Music: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ai-kubernetes-show/id1895650894 TAKEAWAYS ✓ Why real-time inference workloads fit Kubernetes' existing primitives, while training often runs on Slurm instead ✓ How disaggregated inference splits the pre-fill and decode phases of an LLM request across separate pods ✓ Why KV cache blocks move between pods over RDMA, and what happens if the pre-fill or decode pod dies mid-transfer ✓ Why more tokens per second buys agentic systems more capability, not just faster responses ✓ Why Kubernetes proxies built for header-based routing struggle with AI traffic that depends on streamed request bodies ✓ What the AI Gateway Working Group is building to fix it Read the blog post at: https://www.buoyant.io/ai-kubernetes-episode/disaggregated-inference-on-kubernetes






