HACKER Q&A
📣 stormbeard

How can I monetize a load balancer for ML applications?


I have a solution that solves a set of problems that keep showing up in ML workloads. The kind of systems I'm talking about are ones where:

- You have a GPU attached to each instance.

- Each request takes anywhere from 10ms to 2min.

- There's a hard limit on the number of in-flight requests/queries (I assume because of the GPUs).

Normally, I see people fronting the instances with software load balancers, but this doesn't work very well for reasons. Assuming I have a solution in the form of a fancy load balancer, how would I go about monetizing it? Let's assume the solution is non-trivial to create, but very straightforward to use (essentially a drop-in replacement).

I ask because I don't think I can just "sell a fancy load balancer" like it's the late 90s or something. Modern companies appear to always have more complicated products and I just want to sell a straightforward piece of infrastructure that solves a fairly hard problem.

Thanks in advance.


  👤 sargstuff Accepted Answer ✓
Is there accessible documentation which covers installation & non-functional requirements (aka hardware/software requirements & how to setup/use the solution)

👤 sargstuff
what was done to access "doesn't work very well for reasons"? aka monitored systems in questions and saw ...... ?????

What were the "reasons" for "doesn't work very well? aka trying to do goolgle search type work on 2mb intel 486 oover a 2mb network and expecting to be able to compete with google is never going to work out.

What type of load balancing? Load balancing typically has to be tuned/adjusted based on end usage requirements/production environment (not just per factory setting)


👤 talldayo
> but this doesn't work very well for reasons.

Which reasons? In my experience/exposure, people are perfectly happy with Proxmox on a big GPU-laden boxen.


👤 JSDevOps
Why doesn’t software load balancers work? Also surely you just implement queuing?