This topic describes how to quickly deploy the DeepSeek-V4-Flash model in a VKE cluster by using the ServingKit LLM general-purpose template.
DeepSeek-V4-Flash is a lightweight, cost-effective model in the DeepSeek-V4 series designed for high-concurrency, low-latency, and long-context batch processing scenarios. It adopts a sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture with a total parameter count of 284B, dynamically activating only about 13B parameters per forward inference. DeepSeek-V4-Flash supports an adjustable Thinking Budget. Its maximum-performance thinking mode, DeepSeek-V4-Flash-Max, can approach the comprehensive inference performance of V4-Pro when provided with sufficient inference steps. It only slightly underperforms on pure knowledge-intensive tasks and the most complex agent workflows due to its smaller parameter scale. DeepSeek-V4-Flash is suitable for scenarios including high-throughput chatting, long-context batch processing, and cost-sensitive AI agent deployment.
This topic describes how to quickly deploy the DeepSeek-V4-Flash model in a Kubernetes cluster by using the LLM general-purpose template. - To ensure successful deployment, which involves multiple components depending on each other and a variety of configurations, you need to exactly follow the instructions in this document.
- To achieve the expected results and conform to the limits of VKE, you need to perform operations by following the solution described in this article or on the recommended resources. If you need to change your solution, you can consult the account manager of the Volcano Engine.
- Do not use mGPU on GPU resources.
- Some resources of Volcano Engine at the beta stage are required to deploy AI services. To use the following resources, contact your account manager.
- this example, APIG is used to expose the service. Therefore, you need to prepare an APIG instance. You can create an APIG instance in advance, use an existing APIG instance, or leverage automatic instance creation during application deployment on ServingKit.
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create an APIG instance in advance or use an existing one, ensure that the region of the instance matches the region of the VKE cluster. We recommend an instance with both Public network and Private network selected for Network type. For details about creating APIG instances, see Creating instances. - You need to create a high-performance compute (HPC) cluster to achieve logical isolation of HPC GPU instances (compute nodes). Instances in the same cluster are interconnected by Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) networks. For details, see Creating HPC clusters.
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The HPC cluster must be deployed in the same region and availability zone as the VKE cluster.
Step 1: Create a VKE heterogeneous computing cluster
Step 2: Deploy DeepSeek-V4-Flash
- Download and deploy the model using the LLM General Template provided by ServingKit. During deployment, take note of the parameter configurations listed in the following table. For descriptions of other parameters and detailed procedures, see Deploying general-purpose LLM template applications.
- Startup command descriptions
- After successful application deployment, model startup time varies depending on model size. After the application status changes to Running, view the logs of the corresponding instance on the Application details page. If the log contains the following message: The server is fired up and ready to roll!, the model in the application has started successfully and is accessible.
Step 3: Access the service
After the DeepSeek-V4-Flash model service is deployed, obtain the service domain name and access the service.
- Obtain the domain name of the DeepSeek-V4-Flash model service.
- In the left navigation pane of the VKE console, click ServingKit > List of AI applications. On the page that appears, find the deployed DeepSeek-V4-Flash model application.
- Click the → icon in the application section to go to the application details page and view Service domain names.
- In a terminal where the curl command is available, run the following command to access the DeepSeek-V4-Flash model service.
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- Replace ${your_service_domain_name} with the service domain name obtained in the previous step.
- If no terminal is available, you can log in to the node where the model is deployed by using the ECS Terminal method and use the curl command to access the service. For detailed operations, see ECS Terminal.
- The descriptions of parameters are as follows:
- The following figure displays the expected response after you run the command.
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Enhance service security
You can use the API key of APIG to enhance the security of the DeepSeek-V4-Flash service.
- Create a consumer for the APIG instance. For detailed operations, see Creating consumers.
- Generate the Key Auth plugin credential based on the consumer. For detailed operations, see Generating credentials.
- Enable the Key Auth plugin: In the left navigation bar, click Plugin Center. On the page that appears, click Key Auth in the Plugin Category section and then click Create Plugin. Specify the parameters of the plugin.
- Effective level: Select Routing level, and specify the instance, service, and route to which the plugin belongs.
- Authentication configuration: Select header, and specify Authorization as the source, which indicates that the API Key is carried in the Authorization header of the request.
- Consumer: Select the consumer created in Step 1 or select all, which indicates that the configuration also applies to newly created consumers.
- Keep the default values for other parameters.
- After you enable Key Auth plugin authentication, when you access the service by executing the corresponding command, credentials must be included. Otherwise, a message that indicates insufficient permissions will be returned.
ServingKit AI applications support basic cloud-native observability capabilities by default. You can view the application monitoring dashboard on the AI application details page.
- In the left navigation pane of the VKE console, click ServingKit > List of AI applications. On the page that appears, find the deployed DeepSeek-V4-Flash model application.
- Click the → icon in the application section to go to the application details page and view the dashboard on the Observability tab.
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If you have not enabled the observability capability of the relevant cluster, enable observability based on the prompts in the console. For operations related to cloud-native observability capabilities, see Enabling observability and VKE observability.