Kthena

Kthena is a Kubernetes-native LLM inference platform that transforms how organizations deploy and manage Large Language Models in production. Built with declarative model lifecycle management and intelligent request routing, it provides high performance and enterprise-grade scalability for LLM inference workloads.

Kthena manages inference workloads through ModelServing and provides model-aware request routing through ModelServer and ModelRoute.

This guide shows how to deploy a multi-node vLLM service on Kubernetes using ModelServing and expose it through a Kubernetes Service.

We’ll:

Install the required components (Kthena + Volcano).
Deploy a multi-node vLLM model via Kthena’s ModelServing CR.
Validate the deployment.

1. Prerequisites

You need:

A Kubernetes cluster with GPU nodes.
kubectl access with cluster-admin or equivalent permissions.
Volcano 1.14 or later for the role-level gang scheduling used in this example.
Kthena installed with the ModelServing CRD available.
A valid Hugging Face token if loading models from Hugging Face Hub.

1.1 Install Volcano

helm repo add volcano-sh https://volcano-sh.github.io/helm-charts
helm repo update
helm install volcano volcano-sh/volcano -n volcano-system --create-namespace

Volcano provides the gang scheduling used in this example. It is optional for Kthena deployments that do not use Volcano scheduling.

1.2 Install Kthena

helm install kthena oci://ghcr.io/volcano-sh/charts/kthena --version v1.0.0 --namespace kthena-system --create-namespace

The kthena-system namespace is created.
Kthena controllers and CRDs, including ModelServing, are installed.

Validate:

kubectl get pods -n kthena-system
kubectl get crd modelservings.workload.serving.volcano.sh

You should see:

modelservings.workload.serving.volcano.sh   ...

2. The Multi-Node vLLM `ModelServing` Example

Kthena provides an example manifest to deploy a multi-node vLLM cluster running Llama. Each role replica contains an entry pod and its worker pods.

A simplified version of the example (llama-multinode) looks like:

spec.replicas: 1 – one ServingGroup (one logical model deployment).
roles:
- entryTemplate – defines leader pods that run:
  - vLLM’s multi-node cluster bootstrap script.
  - vLLM OpenAI-compatible API server.
- workerTemplate – defines worker pods to join the leader’s Ray cluster (Ray backend) or to join same distributed process group (multiprocessing backend).

Key points from the example YAML:

Image: vllm/vllm-openai:latest (matches upstream vLLM images). Commands:

Multiprocessing (default)

Ray

Leader:

command:
  - sh
  - -c
  - >
    vllm serve meta-llama/Llama-3.1-405B-Instruct
      --tensor-parallel-size 8
      --pipeline-parallel-size 2
      --nnodes=2
      --node-rank=0
      --master-addr=$(ENTRY_ADDRESS)
      --port 8080

Worker:

command:
  - sh
  - -c
  - >
    vllm serve meta-llama/Llama-3.1-405B-Instruct
      --tensor-parallel-size 8
      --pipeline-parallel-size 2
      --nnodes=2
      --node-rank=1
      --master-addr=$(ENTRY_ADDRESS)
      --headless

Leader:

command:
  - sh
  - -c
  - >
    bash /vllm-workspace/examples/ray_serving/multi-node-serving.sh
    leader --ray_cluster_size=2;
    vllm serve meta-llama/Llama-3.1-405B-Instruct --port 8080 --tensor-parallel-size 8
    --pipeline-parallel-size 2 --distributed-executor-backend ray

Worker:

command:
  - sh
  - -c
  - >
    bash /vllm-workspace/examples/ray_serving/multi-node-serving.sh
    worker --ray_address=$(ENTRY_ADDRESS)

3. Deploying Multi-Node llama vLLM via Kthena

3.1 Prepare the Manifest

Recommended: use a Secret instead of a raw env var:

kubectl create secret generic hf-token \
  -n default \
  --from-literal=HUGGING_FACE_HUB_TOKEN='<your-token>'

3.2 Apply the `ModelServing`

Save one of the following manifests to modelserving.yaml:

Multiprocessing (default)

Ray

apiVersion: workload.serving.volcano.sh/v1alpha1
kind: ModelServing
metadata:
  name: llama-multinode
  namespace: default
spec:
  schedulerName: volcano
  replicas: 1  # group replicas
  template:
    restartGracePeriodSeconds: 60
    gangPolicy:
      minRoleReplicas:
        llama-405b: 1
    roles:
      - name: llama-405b
        replicas: 2
        entryTemplate:
          spec:
            containers:
              - name: leader
                image: vllm/vllm-openai:latest
                env:
                  - name: HUGGING_FACE_HUB_TOKEN
                    valueFrom:
                      secretKeyRef:
                        name: hf-token
                        key: HUGGING_FACE_HUB_TOKEN
                command:
                  - sh
                  - -c
                  - "vllm serve meta-llama/Llama-3.1-405B-Instruct --tensor-parallel-size 8 --pipeline-parallel-size 2 --nnodes 2 --node-rank 0 --master-addr $(ENTRY_ADDRESS) --distributed-executor-backend mp --port 8080"
                resources:
                  limits:
                    nvidia.com/gpu: "8"
                    memory: 1124Gi
                    ephemeral-storage: 800Gi
                  requests:
                    ephemeral-storage: 800Gi
                    cpu: 125
                ports:
                  - containerPort: 8080
                readinessProbe:
                  tcpSocket:
                    port: 8080
                  initialDelaySeconds: 15
                  periodSeconds: 10
                volumeMounts:
                  - mountPath: /dev/shm
                    name: dshm
            volumes:
            - name: dshm
              emptyDir:
                medium: Memory
                sizeLimit: 15Gi
        workerReplicas: 1
        workerTemplate:
          spec:
            containers:
              - name: worker
                image: vllm/vllm-openai:latest
                command:
                  - sh
                  - -c
                  - "vllm serve meta-llama/Llama-3.1-405B-Instruct --tensor-parallel-size 8 --pipeline-parallel-size 2 --nnodes 2 --node-rank 1 --master-addr $(ENTRY_ADDRESS) --distributed-executor-backend mp --headless"
                resources:
                  limits:
                    nvidia.com/gpu: "8"
                    memory: 1124Gi
                    ephemeral-storage: 800Gi
                  requests:
                    ephemeral-storage: 800Gi
                    cpu: 125
                env:
                  - name: HUGGING_FACE_HUB_TOKEN
                    valueFrom:
                      secretKeyRef:
                        name: hf-token
                        key: HUGGING_FACE_HUB_TOKEN
                volumeMounts:
                  - mountPath: /dev/shm
                    name: dshm
            volumes:
            - name: dshm
              emptyDir:
                medium: Memory
                sizeLimit: 15Gi

apiVersion: workload.serving.volcano.sh/v1alpha1
kind: ModelServing
metadata:
  name: llama-multinode
  namespace: default
spec:
  schedulerName: volcano
  replicas: 1  # group replicas
  template:
    restartGracePeriodSeconds: 60
    gangPolicy:
      minRoleReplicas:
        llama-405b: 1
    roles:
      - name: llama-405b
        replicas: 2
        entryTemplate:
          spec:
            containers:
              - name: leader
                image: vllm/vllm-openai:latest
                env:
                  - name: HUGGING_FACE_HUB_TOKEN
                    valueFrom:
                      secretKeyRef:
                        name: hf-token
                        key: HUGGING_FACE_HUB_TOKEN
                command:
                  - sh
                  - -c
                  - "bash /vllm-workspace/examples/ray_serving/multi-node-serving.sh leader --ray_cluster_size=2;
                    vllm serve meta-llama/Llama-3.1-405B-Instruct --port 8080 --tensor-parallel-size 8 --pipeline-parallel-size 2 --distributed-executor-backend ray"
                resources:
                  limits:
                    nvidia.com/gpu: "8"
                    memory: 1124Gi
                    ephemeral-storage: 800Gi
                  requests:
                    ephemeral-storage: 800Gi
                    cpu: 125
                ports:
                  - containerPort: 8080
                readinessProbe:
                  tcpSocket:
                    port: 8080
                  initialDelaySeconds: 15
                  periodSeconds: 10
                volumeMounts:
                  - mountPath: /dev/shm
                    name: dshm
            volumes:
            - name: dshm
              emptyDir:
                medium: Memory
                sizeLimit: 15Gi
        workerReplicas: 1
        workerTemplate:
          spec:
            containers:
              - name: worker
                image: vllm/vllm-openai:latest
                command:
                  - sh
                  - -c
                  - "bash /vllm-workspace/examples/ray_serving/multi-node-serving.sh worker --ray_address=$(ENTRY_ADDRESS)"
                resources:
                  limits:
                    nvidia.com/gpu: "8"
                    memory: 1124Gi
                    ephemeral-storage: 800Gi
                  requests:
                    ephemeral-storage: 800Gi
                    cpu: 125
                env:
                  - name: HUGGING_FACE_HUB_TOKEN
                    valueFrom:
                      secretKeyRef:
                        name: hf-token
                        key: HUGGING_FACE_HUB_TOKEN
                volumeMounts:
                  - mountPath: /dev/shm
                    name: dshm
            volumes:
            - name: dshm
              emptyDir:
                medium: Memory
                sizeLimit: 15Gi

kubectl apply -f modelserving.yaml

Kthena will:

Create a ModelServing object.
Derive a PodGroup for Volcano gang scheduling.
Create the leader and worker pods for each ServingGroup and Role.

4. Verifying the Deployment

4.1 Check ModelServing Status

Use the snippet from the Kthena docs:

kubectl get modelserving -oyaml | grep status -A 10

You should see something like:

status:
  availableReplicas: 1
  conditions:
    - type: Available
      status: "True"
      reason: AllGroupsReady
      message: All Serving groups are ready
    - type: Progressing
      status: "False"
      ...
  replicas: 1
  updatedReplicas: 1

4.2 Check Pods

List pods for your deployment:

kubectl get pod -owide -l modelserving.volcano.sh/name=llama-multinode

Example output (from docs):

NAMESPACE   NAME                                   READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE   IP            NODE           ...
default     llama-multinode-0-llama-405b-0-0    1/1     Running   0          15m   10.244.0.56   192.168.5.12   ...
default     llama-multinode-0-llama-405b-0-1    1/1     Running   0          15m   10.244.0.58   192.168.5.43   ...
default     llama-multinode-0-llama-405b-1-0    1/1     Running   0          15m   10.244.0.57   192.168.5.58   ...
default     llama-multinode-0-llama-405b-1-1    1/1     Running   0          15m   10.244.0.53   192.168.5.36   ...

Pod name pattern:

llama-multinode-<group-idx>-<role-name>-<replica-idx>-<ordinal>.

The first index identifies the ServingGroup, followed by the role name (llama-405b), role replica index, and pod index.

5. Accessing the vLLM OpenAI-Compatible API

Save the following Service as service.yaml to expose the entry pods:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: llama-multinode-openai
  namespace: default
spec:
  selector:
    modelserving.volcano.sh/name: llama-multinode
    modelserving.volcano.sh/entry: "true"
  ports:
    - name: http
      port: 80
      targetPort: 8080
  type: ClusterIP

Apply the Service, then port-forward from your local machine:

kubectl apply -f service.yaml
kubectl port-forward svc/llama-multinode-openai 30080:80 -n default

Then:

List models:

curl -s http://localhost:30080/v1/models

Send a completion request (mirroring vLLM production stack docs):

curl -X POST http://localhost:30080/v1/completions \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "model": "meta-llama/Llama-3.1-405B-Instruct",
    "prompt": "Once upon a time,",
    "max_tokens": 10
  }'

You should see an OpenAI-style response from vLLM.

6. Clean Up

To remove the deployment and its resources:

kubectl delete -f service.yaml
kubectl delete modelserving llama-multinode -n default

If you’re done with the entire stack:

helm uninstall kthena -n kthena-system   # or your Kthena release name
helm uninstall volcano -n volcano-system

For model-aware routing and prefill-decode disaggregation, see the Kthena documentation.

Kthena

Kthena

1. Prerequisites

1.1 Install Volcano

1.2 Install Kthena

2. The Multi-Node vLLM ModelServing Example

Yaml

3. Deploying Multi-Node llama vLLM via Kthena

3.1 Prepare the Manifest

3.2 Apply the ModelServing

modelserving.yaml

4. Verifying the Deployment

4.1 Check ModelServing Status

4.2 Check Pods

5. Accessing the vLLM OpenAI-Compatible API

6. Clean Up

2. The Multi-Node vLLM `ModelServing` Example

3.2 Apply the `ModelServing`