Cluster · capacity check
Google Cloud runbook · model rank #9

Stand up Kimi K3
on Google Cloud.

Uses A GKE Standard GPU cluster; Vertex replicas do not shard one model across nodes. GKE Standard GPU cluster; regional quota and GPUDirect networking support must be checked. Teams standardizing model serving in Vertex AI with custom containers and raw prediction.

Cluster · capacity check: Uses A GKE Standard GPU cluster; Vertex replicas do not shard one model across nodes. GKE Standard GPU cluster; regional quota and GPUDirect networking support must be checked. SGLang hardware-specific baseline. Select the current matching topology and calculate the Mamba memory ratio before launch; no local cluster test has been run.

Not GPU-tested

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.

Google Cloud setup, in the order that matters

A GKE Standard GPU cluster; Vertex replicas do not shard one model across nodes. Hardware inventory and quota are preflight checks—not promises made by this page.

  1. 01

    Provision the cluster path

    Use GKE Standard for exactly 2 nodes × 8 H200 (16 GPUs / 2,256GB HBM). Do not scale ordinary endpoint replicas and assume they become tensor-parallel workers.

  2. 02

    Prepare networking and storage

    Validate GPUDirect/RDMA-capable networking, reserve at least 2150GB for moonshotai/Kimi-K3, and distribute lmsysorg/sglang:kimi-k3-cu12 to every node.

  3. 03

    Launch one rank per 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.

  4. 04

    Publish only after verification

    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.

Container imagelmsysorg/sglang:kimi-k3-cu12
lmsysorg/sglang:kimi-k3-cu12

Use this as the provider image. Do not try to run Docker inside a RunPod or Vast container.

Server launchDistributed SGLang command
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.

Smoke testOpenAI-compatible request
# 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.

Quota, license, and storage

  • Confirm the exact 2 nodes × 8 H200 (16 GPUs / 2,256GB HBM) topology—not only the aggregate HBM—is available.
  • Read the Kimi K3 license terms and accept any gated-model conditions.
  • Budget at least 2150GB for weights, cache, and container layers.
  • Keep HF_TOKEN in the provider secret store—not in scripts or templates.

Memory, format, and shutdown

  • Record idle/free VRAM after the model loads and after a representative prompt.
  • Validate the official chat template, reasoning parser, and tool-call parser.
  • Add authentication and TLS in front of port 30000.
  • Verify the provider's stop/delete action actually ends compute billing.

Use this guide with an agent

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.

Inference deployment prompt
Download .txt
Deploy Kimi K3 (moonshotai/Kimi-K3) on Google Cloud.

Use this guide as the starting context: https://getflops.ai/models/kimi-k3/gcp.

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://docs.cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/best-practices/machine-learning/inference

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.

Guardrails included No secrets in files · verify primary docs · approval before spend

The sources that define this path

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.

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