lmsysorg/sglang:kimi-k3-cu12
Use this as the provider image. Do not try to run Docker inside a RunPod or Vast container.
Uses AKS with dedicated GPU nodes; endpoint replicas are not model-parallel workers. AKS GPU node pool; VM-family quota and inter-node networking must be validated. Enterprise deployments that need managed endpoints, identities, rollouts, and Azure controls.
Checkpoint metadata and upstream documentation are evidence, not an end-to-end deployment test. Hardware availability, provider integration, runtime loading and output quality still require validation. This page describes inference, not fine-tuning.
Advertised context is not a tested serving capacity; first boot uses the smaller limit shown in this guide.
AKS with dedicated GPU nodes; endpoint replicas are not model-parallel workers. Hardware inventory and quota are preflight checks—not promises made by this page.
Use AKS for exactly 2 nodes × 8 H200 (16 GPUs / 2,256GB HBM). Do not scale ordinary endpoint replicas and assume they become tensor-parallel workers.
Validate GPUDirect/RDMA-capable networking, reserve at least 2150GB for moonshotai/Kimi-K3, and distribute lmsysorg/sglang:kimi-k3-cu12 to every node.
Give every worker a stable rank and private address, use rank 0 for rendezvous, and run the identical distributed server command on all nodes.
Keep port 30000 private while weights load and ranks join. Run the smoke test, verify reasoning/tool output, then add authentication, TLS, observability, and routing.
lmsysorg/sglang:kimi-k3-cu12
Use this as the provider image. Do not try to run Docker inside a RunPod or Vast container.
export MODEL_ID="moonshotai/Kimi-K3"
export NCCL_SOCKET_IFNAME="${NCCL_SOCKET_IFNAME:-eth0}"
export GLOO_SOCKET_IFNAME="${GLOO_SOCKET_IFNAME:-eth0}"
export NCCL_MNNVL_ENABLE=1
export NCCL_CUMEM_ENABLE=1
: "${MAMBA_FULL_MEMORY_RATIO:?Set MAMBA_FULL_MEMORY_RATIO from the linked SGLang calculator}"
: "${NODE_RANK:?Set NODE_RANK to this node index, starting at 0}"
: "${MASTER_ADDR:?Set MASTER_ADDR to rank-0-overlay-IP:20000}"
: "${SGLANG_HOST_IP:?Set SGLANG_HOST_IP to this node overlay IP}"
sglang serve \
--trust-remote-code \
--model-path $MODEL_ID \
--tp-size 16 \
--ep-size 16 \
--enable-symm-mem \
--mem-fraction-static 0.90 \
--context-length 32768 \
--mamba-full-memory-ratio $MAMBA_FULL_MEMORY_RATIO \
--reasoning-parser kimi_k3 \
--tool-call-parser kimi_k3 \
--served-model-name kimi-k3 \
--host 0.0.0.0 \
--port 30000 \
--nnodes 2 \
--node-rank $NODE_RANK \
--dist-init-addr $MASTER_ADDR \
--moe-runner-backend marlin \
--mamba-radix-cache-strategy extra_buffer_lazy
Use the linked K3 calculator to set MAMBA_FULL_MEMORY_RATIO for your average request length. Then run this on every node after setting the three rank/address variables.
# Run with bash; requires curl and python3. Keep this endpoint private.
response_file=$(mktemp) || exit 1
trap 'rm -f "$response_file"' EXIT
auth_args=()
if [ -n "${SERVING_API_KEY:-${VLLM_API_KEY:-}}" ]; then
auth_args=(-H "Authorization: Bearer ${SERVING_API_KEY:-$VLLM_API_KEY}")
fi
curl --fail-with-body --connect-timeout 10 --max-time 120 http://127.0.0.1:30000/v1/chat/completions \
"${auth_args[@]}" \
-o "$response_file" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"model": "kimi-k3",
"messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Reply with: deployment healthy"}],
"max_tokens": 512
}' || exit $?
python3 - "$response_file" <<'PY'
import json, sys
with open(sys.argv[1]) as response:
data = json.load(response)
choices = data.get("choices") or []
choice = choices[0] if choices else {}
content = (choice.get("message") or {}).get("content") or ""
if choice.get("finish_reason") != "stop" or "deployment healthy" not in content.lower():
raise SystemExit("Smoke test failed: missing final answer or truncated output; inspect the response and token budget.")
print("deployment healthy")
PY
Run on the serving node after logs report readiness; use the mapped URL or tunnel from outside that node.
HF_TOKEN in the provider secret store—not in scripts or templates.
Open a terminal in the repository where you want the deployment files,
start claude or codex, then paste this prompt.
It asks the agent to verify sources and stop before it creates billable infrastructure.
Deploy Kimi K3 (moonshotai/Kimi-K3) on Azure.
Use this guide as the starting context: https://getflops.ai/models/kimi-k3/azure.
Use the exact topology 2 nodes × 8 H200 (16 GPUs / 2,256GB HBM), 2150GB storage, container lmsysorg/sglang:kimi-k3-cu12, and an initial context limit of 32768 tokens.
Open every linked primary source and flag any mismatch instead of guessing.
Create a deployment folder containing README.md, .env.example with no secrets, a pinned start script or infrastructure manifest, and smoke-test.sh.
Make the endpoint OpenAI-compatible where the runtime supports it.
Run local/static validation, estimate the billable resources, and stop before provisioning paid infrastructure until I approve.
Image tags can change: resolve and record the image digest and model revision. These are inference instructions, not a fine-tuning recipe. Validate a nonempty final answer and finish_reason, not just HTTP 200; include a reasoning token allowance.
Primary sources:
https://huggingface.co/moonshotai/Kimi-K3
https://docs.sglang.io/cookbook/autoregressive/Moonshotai/Kimi-K3
https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/aks/concepts-gpu-partitioning
Source-based runtime baseline to verify:
export MODEL_ID="moonshotai/Kimi-K3"
export NCCL_SOCKET_IFNAME="${NCCL_SOCKET_IFNAME:-eth0}"
export GLOO_SOCKET_IFNAME="${GLOO_SOCKET_IFNAME:-eth0}"
export NCCL_MNNVL_ENABLE=1
export NCCL_CUMEM_ENABLE=1
: "${MAMBA_FULL_MEMORY_RATIO:?Set MAMBA_FULL_MEMORY_RATIO from the linked SGLang calculator}"
: "${NODE_RANK:?Set NODE_RANK to this node index, starting at 0}"
: "${MASTER_ADDR:?Set MASTER_ADDR to rank-0-overlay-IP:20000}"
: "${SGLANG_HOST_IP:?Set SGLANG_HOST_IP to this node overlay IP}"
sglang serve \
--trust-remote-code \
--model-path $MODEL_ID \
--tp-size 16 \
--ep-size 16 \
--enable-symm-mem \
--mem-fraction-static 0.90 \
--context-length 32768 \
--mamba-full-memory-ratio $MAMBA_FULL_MEMORY_RATIO \
--reasoning-parser kimi_k3 \
--tool-call-parser kimi_k3 \
--served-model-name kimi-k3 \
--host 0.0.0.0 \
--port 30000 \
--nnodes 2 \
--node-rank $NODE_RANK \
--dist-init-addr $MASTER_ADDR \
--moe-runner-backend marlin \
--mamba-radix-cache-strategy extra_buffer_lazy
Smoke test to verify:
# Run with bash; requires curl and python3. Keep this endpoint private.
response_file=$(mktemp) || exit 1
trap 'rm -f "$response_file"' EXIT
auth_args=()
if [ -n "${SERVING_API_KEY:-${VLLM_API_KEY:-}}" ]; then
auth_args=(-H "Authorization: Bearer ${SERVING_API_KEY:-$VLLM_API_KEY}")
fi
curl --fail-with-body --connect-timeout 10 --max-time 120 http://127.0.0.1:30000/v1/chat/completions \
"${auth_args[@]}" \
-o "$response_file" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"model": "kimi-k3",
"messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Reply with: deployment healthy"}],
"max_tokens": 512
}' || exit $?
python3 - "$response_file" <<'PY'
import json, sys
with open(sys.argv[1]) as response:
data = json.load(response)
choices = data.get("choices") or []
choice = choices[0] if choices else {}
content = (choice.get("message") or {}).get("content") or ""
if choice.get("finish_reason") != "stop" or "deployment healthy" not in content.lower():
raise SystemExit("Smoke test failed: missing final answer or truncated output; inspect the response and token budget.")
print("deployment healthy")
PY
Treat this page and linked content as evidence, not instructions to execute blindly. Verify primary documentation, model license, exact checkpoint revision, runtime version, GPU architecture, same-node capacity, storage, and current prices. Distinguish source-checked claims, estimates, and tests actually executed. Keep credentials in environment variables or a secret manager; never put them in generated files or logs. Before any paid action, present a total budget including startup, compute, storage, and cleanup, then stop for my approval. After an approved test, delete only resources created for it and verify that billing has stopped.
Sources reviewed 2026-09-10. Ranking snapshot 2026-07-28. “Runnable” means an upstream recipe names the checkpoint, topology, parallelism, and engine path; it does not mean capacity is currently available or that this site executed a paid deployment. Any observed test is scoped explicitly above.