Building kukie-oven, a Go operator that turns one ServedModel into a PVC, a download Job and a vLLM Deployment — the reconcile order, two server-side-apply field managers, telling someone else’s object from a leftover, Helm and GHCR packaging, an EBS CSI role limited by a tag boundary, and the first real run on an L40S: Ready in 14 minutes 11 seconds with no manual step.
Why an external LLM API plan became a Helm add-on for users’ GPU clusters — quality and cost numbers behind the pivot, three layers split by required permissions, a chart with per-layer switches and a preflight job, the measurement-to-429 loop, an honest comparison with KubeAI and LiteLLM, and what is built versus still planned.
Measuring how many concurrent requests one NVIDIA L40S serves within a latency SLA before building a GPU cluster — the SLA draft as TTFT and inter-token latency, a single g6e.xlarge with two stop guards, a measurement script split from the server so it can run as a Kubernetes Job, results for four open models, why MoE models outrun a dense 27B on memory bandwidth, KV cache FP8 for 20% more headroom, and two review fixes.