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326 changes: 326 additions & 0 deletions docs/proposals/376-metric-aggregagor/README.md
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# Proposal-376: Gateway Metric Aggregator

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- [Summary](#summary)
- [Motivation](#motivation)
- [Goals](#goals)
- [Non-Goals](#non-goals)
- [Proposal](#proposal)
- [User Stories (Optional)](#user-stories-optional)
- [Story 1](#story-1)
- [Story 2](#story-2)
- [Notes/Constraints/Caveats (Optional)](#notesconstraintscaveats-optional)
- [Risks and Mitigations](#risks-and-mitigations)
- [Design Details](#design-details)
- [Test Plan](#test-plan)
- [Prerequisite testing updates](#prerequisite-testing-updates)
- [Unit tests](#unit-tests)
- [Integration tests](#integration-tests)
- [e2e tests](#e2e-tests)
- [Graduation Criteria](#graduation-criteria)
- [Implementation History](#implementation-history)
- [Drawbacks](#drawbacks)
- [Alternatives](#alternatives)
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## Summary

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Metric-based scheduling is common in many systems, including Kubernetes. For GenAI, this becomes more complex because of the heavy computational requirements of models. This proposal outlines a design for a metric aggregator that can efficiently handle the unique challenges posed by GenAI workloads.

## Motivation

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With traditional services, because the final results will be generated in a very short time, common algorithms like round-robin or least-connection are enough.

However, in inference services, because of the heavy computations of the matrix multiplication, the result generation is often very slow, which is an essential difference with the traditional services. Therefore, we need more advanced algorithms to help us make wise scheduling decisions. For example, based on the inference engine's queue size, kv cache size, or combined metrics.

All these indicators should be collected from the inference engines for further analysis, that's why a metric aggregator is needed.

### Goals

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- A simple implementation with least busy scheduling algorithm
- Extensible with different consumers in the cluster, like the Lora autoscaler or the ai gateway
- Metrics visualization support, like Grafana
- Metric management support, especially the gc policy

### Non-Goals

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- Different scheduling algorithm implementations in ai gateway
- LoRA aware scheduling implementation, will be left to another KEP
- Performance consideration in big clusters should be left to the Beta level

## Proposal

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### User Stories (Optional)

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#### Story 1

As a user, I hope my LLM request could be routed to the least-busy instance, so that I can get the result as soon as possible.

#### Story 2

As a RAG user, when retrieving documents, sometime they'are the same, so I hope my request could be routed to the instance with the most available kv cache to avoid the repetitive calculation, which is know as the prefix cache aware scheduling.

### Notes/Constraints/Caveats (Optional)

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Metrics-based routing should meet the baseline requirements: even the metrics are unavailable or outdated, the system should still be able to work, despite the fact that the request response may be slower. For example, metrics-based lora scheduling is unfit here because once the metric indicates the wrong instance, we may hit 500 server error, it's unacceptable.

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The metrics might be outdated or even unable to fetch, the router then may make suboptimal decisions, but as mentioned above, the system can still work with a slow response.

## Design Details

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The overall flow looks like:

![flow](./flow.png)


### Steps

Let's break down the flow into several steps:

- Step 1: we'll collect the metrics from the inference workloads, we choose `PUSH` mode here just to put less pressure on the gateway side, or the gateway will have iterate all the Pods which obviously will lead to performance issues.
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This is just a thought, not a question this solution: 🤔 If we use sidecar reporting, and this inference service is deployed by the user, if there is billing or resource usage, will the user be charged?

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In addition, we must ensure that sidecar is basically not updated and has no errors. Imagine that if there is a bug fix in sidecar, will it affect all users who have already deployed it?

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Changed the design with PULL mode. Copy the alternatives here:

- When collecting metrics from the inference workloads, `PUSH` mode will put less pressure on the gateway side, or the gateway will have iterate all the Pods which obviously will lead to performance issues. We didn't pick the approach because it will either add additional load to the inference workload and introduces more complexity to the system. The current approach will fork as much goroutines as the number of inference workloads to sync the metrics in parallel, this is feasible because goroutine is lightweight. Once the metrics aggregator becomes the bottleneck, we can consider to use `PUSH` mode at node level.

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Are all metrics predefined by us or allow users defined by themselves?

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Right now, we define the algo and the metrics come from the inference engines.

- Step 2: the gateway plugin will parse the metrics and store them in the redis, this is for HA consideration and cache sharing. Once the instance is down, we can still retrieve the metrics from redis. And if we have multiple instances, we can share the metrics with each other via redis. Considering Envoy AI gateway already uses Redis for limit rating, we'll reuse the Redis here.
- Step 3 & 4: Traffic comes, and the Router will retrieve the metrics from Redis and make routing decisions based on different algorithms, like queue size aware scheduling.
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IIUC, Router is gateway, right? If so, I think gateway is unambiguous.

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changed to router across all the places.

- Step 5: The router will send the request to the selected instance, and the instance will return the result to the router, return to the user finally.


### Additional components introduced:

- Pod Sidecar: a sidecar container is necessary for each inference workload, which was introduced in Kubernetes 1.28 as alpha feature, and enabled by default in 1.29, see [details](https://kubernetes.io/blog/2023/08/25/native-sidecar-containers/). The sidecar will be responsible for collecting the metrics and pushing them to the AI gateway. Let's set the interval time to 100ms at first.
- Redis: a Redis instance is necessary for the metrics storage and sharing, we can use the existing Redis instance in the cluster, or deploy a new one if not available.
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When designing this part, we can make it more scalable. If we need to replace redis with other cache engines later, it will be more convenient. 😄

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Yes, this is more about the implementation details. I didn't mention too much here.

- Gateway Plugin: a new plugin or [DynamicLoadBalancingBackend](https://github.com/envoyproxy/ai-gateway/blob/be2b479b04bc7a219b0c8239143bfbabebdcd615/filterapi/filterconfig.go#L199-L208) specifically in Envoy AI gateway to pick the best-fit Pod endpoints. However, we may block by the upstream issue [here](https://github.com/envoyproxy/ai-gateway/issues/604), we'll work with the Envoy AI Gateway team to resolve it ASAP. Maybe the final design will impact our implementation a bit but not much I think.

### Data Structure
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When we consider the calculation of metrics, there is another point: there may be metrics that are expired or have not been reported. When we score, we need to consider this part to avoid invalid metrics affecting the final routing results.

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Yes, this is the most annoying part, see updates.


The data structure could be varied based on the metrics we want to collect, let's take the queue size as an example:

Because redis is a kv store, we'll use the ZSET to store the results, `LeastBusy::ModelName` as the key, Pod name as the member and the (runningQueueSize * 0.3 + waitingQueueSize * 0.7) as the score, the factor of waitingQueueSize is higher because metric is a delayed indicator. RunningQueueSize and WaitingQueueSize are two metrics most of the inference engines support.

Also set the expiration time to 500ms just in case the metric reporting is delayed and lead to the hotspot issue.

Note: the algorithm is not the final one, we'll have more discussions with the community to find the best one.

### Test Plan

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[x] I/we understand the owners of the involved components may require updates to
existing tests to make this code solid enough prior to committing the changes necessary
to implement this enhancement.

##### Prerequisite testing updates

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##### Unit tests

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- Hard to predict now since it's a new component, but try the best to make sure all the functionalities are covered.

##### Integration tests

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- By faking the metrics to make sure the router can pick the right instance.

##### e2e tests

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We expect no non-infra related flakes in the last month as a GA graduation criteria.
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- Add one e2e test to make sure the whole system can be launched via helm chart.
- For performance, we'll have benchmarks rather than e2e tests.

### Graduation Criteria

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Beta:

- No performance issues in big clusters, we may user daemonset to report metrics.
- Other storages rather than KV store who supports only key-value pairs which might be not enough for more complex scenarios.

## Implementation History

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- 2025-05-08: Proposal initialized and submitted for review

## Drawbacks

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## Alternatives

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38 changes: 38 additions & 0 deletions docs/proposals/376-metric-aggregagor/proposal.yaml
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title: Gateway Metric Aggregator
proposal-number: 376
authors:
- kerthcet
status: implementable
creation-date: 2025-04-25
reviewers:
- cr7258
- googs1025
approvers:
- TBD

see-also: []

replaces: []

# The target maturity stage in the current dev cycle for this proposal.
stage: beta

# The most recent milestone for which work toward delivery of this proposal has been
# done. This can be the current (upcoming) milestone, if it is being actively
# worked on.
latest-milestone: "v0.2"

# The milestone at which this feature was, or is targeted to be, at each stage.
milestone:
alpha: "v0.2"
beta: TBD
stable: TBD

# The following PRR answers are required at alpha release
# List the feature gate name and the components for which it must be enabled
feature-gates: []

disable-supported: true

# The following PRR answers are required at beta release
metrics: []
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