GitOps Release Promotion for the Accelerator Stack

The whole accelerator stack (firmware, driver, runtime, compiler, model server) as one release manifest in Git, promoted through rings with Argo CD or Flux, gated by policy as code, signed with provenance, rolled back layer by layer, and audited from Git history.

Overview

The job

A model served on custom accelerators depends on six separately built layers: board firmware, the kernel driver, the device plugin, the runtime, the compiler and the model server. Each layer team ships on its own schedule, yet the layers only work in tested combinations. A driver that is fine with compiler 3.2 can hang with compiler 3.3.

The CI/CD or infrastructure engineer makes the combination the unit of release. Picture an AI lab running its own accelerators in 40 Kubernetes clusters: dev, a CI fleet, a canary cluster that takes a slice of real traffic, and production by region. Git holds the desired state of every cluster, Argo CD (or Flux) makes each cluster match it, and promotion is a reviewed pull request that moves one tested combination from one ring to the next.

Interview questions

  • Design GitOps-based release promotion for a stack of firmware, driver, runtime, compiler and model server across dev, CI, canary and production clusters.
  • A release changed the driver and the compiler. Canary shows a 3% throughput regression. Walk through rollback and root cause.
  • How do you roll out firmware that cannot be rolled back across a fleet of thousands of accelerator nodes?
  • How do you prove, months later, exactly which stack ran on a cluster when a model regression was trained or served?
  • Argo CD or Flux for an accelerator fleet of 40 clusters? What would decide it?

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