If you serve LLMs on Kubernetes without inference-aware routing, your load balancer is likely wasting inference capacity. Generic HTTP traffic management blindly routes requests, assuming the backends in your cluster are interchangeable. But your model-serving backends are stateful and unevenly prepared to handle any given request. As a result, requests are often routed to the backend that’s not the one best suited to respond.

Migrating to Gateway API gives you a more capable foundation for traffic management and opens the door to inference-aware routing. The Kubernetes Gateway API’s Inference Extension routes requests based on backend serving state, which tends to make better use of cluster capacity and reduce request latency.

In this post, we’ll look at how the Inference Extension works, the routing strategies it enables, and the signals you can use to monitor whether inference-aware routing is behaving as intended in production.