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2025

Self-Service Fractional GPU Memory with Rafay GPU PaaS

In Part-1, we explored how Rafay GPU PaaS empowers developers to use fractional GPUs, allowing multiple workloads to share GPU compute efficiently. This enabled better utilization and cost control — without compromising isolation or performance.

In Part-2, we will show how you can enhance this by provide users the means to select fractional GPU memory. While fractional GPUs provide a share of the GPU’s compute cores, different workloads have dramatically different GPU memory needs. With this update, developers can now choose exactly how much GPU memory they want for their pods — bringing fine-grained control, better scheduling, and cost efficiency.

Fractional GPU Memory

Self-Service Fractional GPUs with Rafay GPU PaaS

Enterprises and GPU Cloud providers are rapidly evolving toward a self-service model for developers and data scientists. They want to provide instant access to high-performance compute — especially GPUs — while keeping utilization high and costs under control.

Rafay GPU PaaS enables enterprises and GPU Clouds to achieve exactly that: developers and data scientists can spin up resources such as Developer Pods or Jupyter Notebooks backed by fractional GPUs, directly from an intuitive self-service interface.

This is Part-1 in a multi-part series on end user, self service access to Fractional GPU based AI/ML resources.

Fractional GPU

NVIDIA NIM Operator: Bringing AI Model Deployment to the Kubernetes Era

In the previous blog, we learnt the basics about NIM (NVIDIA Inference Microservices). In this follow-on blog, we will do a deep dive into the NIM Kubernetes Operator, a Kubernetes-native extension that automates the deployment and management of NVIDIA’s NIM containers. By combining the strengths of Kubernetes orchestration with NVIDIA’s optimized inference stack, the NIM Operator makes it dramatically easier to deliver production-grade generative AI at scale.

NIM Operator

NVIDIA NIM: Why It Matters—and How It Stacks Up

Generative AI is moving from experiments to production, and the bottleneck is no longer training—it’s serving: getting high-quality model inference running reliably, efficiently, and securely across clouds, data centers, and the edge.

NVIDIA’s answer is NIM (NVIDIA Inference Microservices). NIM a set of prebuilt, performance-tuned containers that expose industry-standard APIs for popular model families (LLMs, vision, speech) and run anywhere there’s an NVIDIA GPU. Think of NIM as a “batteries-included” model-serving layer that blends TensorRT-LLM optimizations, Triton runtimes, security hardening, and OpenAI-compatible APIs into one deployable unit.

NIM Logo

Dynamic Resource Allocation for GPU Allocation on Rafay's MKS (Kubernetes 1.34)

This blog demonstrates how to leverage Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA) for efficient GPU allocation using Multi-Instance GPU (MIG) strategy on Rafay's Managed Kubernetes Service (MKS) running Kubernetes 1.34.

In our previous blog series, we covered various aspects of Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA) in Kubernetes:

DRA is GA in Kubernetes 1.34

With Kubernetes 1.34, Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA) is Generally Available (GA) and enabled by default on MKS clusters. This means you can immediately start using DRA features without additional configuration.

Prerequisites

Before we begin, ensure you have:

  • A Rafay MKS cluster running Kubernetes 1.34 (see MKS v1.34 Blog)
  • GPU nodes with compatible NVIDIA GPUs (A100, H100, or similar MIG-capable GPUs)
  • Container Device Interface (CDI) enabled (automatically enabled in MKS for Kubernetes 1.34)
  • Basic understanding of Dynamic Resource Allocation concepts (covered in our previous blog series)
  • Active Rafay account with appropriate permissions to manage MKS clusters and addons

Kubernetes v1.34 for Rafay MKS

As part of our continuous effort to bring the latest Kubernetes versions to our users, support for Kubernetes v1.34 will be added soon to the Rafay Operations Platform for MKS cluster types.

Both new cluster provisioning and in-place upgrades of existing clusters are supported. As with most Kubernetes releases, this version also deprecates and removes a number of features. To ensure there is zero impact to our customers, we have made sure that every feature in the Rafay Kubernetes Operations Platform has been validated on this Kubernetes version. This will be promoted from Preview to Production in a few days and will be made available to all customers.

Kubernetes v1.34 Release

Deploy Workload using DRA ResourceClaim in Kubernetes

In the first blog in the DRA series, we introduced the concept of Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA) that recently went GA in Kubernetes v1.34 which was released end of August 2025.

In the second blog, we installed a Kuberneres v1.34 cluster and deployed an example DRA driver on it with "simulated GPUs". In this blog, we’ll will deploy a few workloads on the DRA enabled Kubernetes cluster to understand how "Resource Claim" and "ResourceClaimTemplates" work.

Info

We have optimized the steps for users to experience this on their laptops in less than 5 minutes. The steps in this blog are optimized for macOS users.

GPU/Neo Cloud Billing using Rafay’s Usage Metering APIs

Cloud providers offering GPU or Neo Cloud services need accurate and automated mechanisms to track resource consumption. Usage data becomes the foundation for billing, showback, or chargeback models that customers expect. The Rafay Platform provides usage metering APIs that can be easily integrated into a provider’s billing system. '

In this blog, we’ll walk through how to use these APIs with a sample Python script to generate detailed usage reports.

Usage Metering

Upstream Kubernetes on RHEL 10 using Rafay

Our upcoming release update will add support for a number of new features and enhancements. This blog is focused on the upcoming support for Upstream Kubernetes on nodes based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) v10.0. Both new cluster provisioning and in-place upgrades of Kubernetes clusters will be supported for lifecycle management.

RHEL 9.2