A few years ago, Roland Huss and I wrote Kubernetes Patterns, a catalogue of repeatable solutions for building cloud-native applications on Kubernetes. The book covers patterns across six categories: foundational, behavioral, structural, configuration, security, and advanced, everything from health probes and init containers to controllers, operators, and elastic scaling. Recently, Roland and Daniele Zonca co-authored a new book, Generative AI on Kubernetes, which covers the operational side of running LLMs on Kubernetes. I was a reviewer on that book, and the more I read through it, the more I recognized patterns from our original work, just applied to a very different class of workload. Deployments, StatefulSets, Init Containers, DaemonSets. They were all there. Just with bigger numbers.

Here is a high-level summary of how Kubernetes patterns apply to LLM workloads, which Roland and I will cover in more detail in our upcoming KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026 talk in Amsterdam.