3 What are the building blocks of SUSE AI Factory? #
SUSE AI Factory consists of a Kubernetes operator and a Rancher UI extension. It lets you install and manage individual applications from AI Library as well as group them into stacks called blueprints.
3.1 Foundation #
The base layer of SUSE AI Factory is deployed on bare metal or cloud-hosted nodes, preferably deployed by the SUSE Elemental. It consists of the following components:
a prescribed configuration of the SLES 16 operating system
RKE2 Kubernetes management cluster
SUSE Rancher Prime that supports the UI extension and Kubernetes operator code for SUSE AI Factory
optionally, SUSE Security and SUSE Observability work together to provide high security and advanced monitoring capability across all AI workloads
3.2 AI Factory #
SUSE AI Factory consists of a Kubernetes operator and its Rancher UI extension. It serves the following purposes:
Discover, install and manage individual applications from AI Library.
Discover, install and manage preconfigured blueprints that bundle specific applications to match a target use-case.
Create custom blueprints based on customer’s AI application selection.
Both running applications and blueprints can be shared across Rancher-managed clusters.
3.3 Blueprints #
Blueprints are published, immutable and version-controlled stacks of applications required for a specific use-case. Because AI workloads require multiple interconnected applications, a Blueprint tightly packages these necessary components into a single unit that can be deployed with one click.
An example of a Blueprint is a RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) workload. It typically consists of the following components:
A vector database such as Qdrant or Milvus, to store high-dimensional vector embeddings.
An LLM inference engine such as Ollama or vLLM to process both the user’s prompt and the retrieved context to generate the final textual response.
A user interface such as Open WebUI to provide an interface for end-users to interact with the pipeline.
SUSE AI Factory is delivered with a set of prebuilt SUSE blueprints. You can also create custom blueprints and select your own set of AI applications.