KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2024

Just as container images are vital to cloud-native technology, AI models are crucial to AI technology. Effectively, conveniently, and safely managing, maintaining, and distributing AI models is critical for supporting workflows like AI model training, inference, and application deployment. This presentation explores AI model management based on OCI standards and the Harbor project. Standardizing AI model structures and characteristics using OCI specifications and extension mechanisms like OCI Reference to link datasets and dependencies. When large models require efficient loading or privacy considerations, model replication or proxy with upstream repositories like Hugging Face becomes essential. Enhancing model distribution security through signing, vulnerability scanning, and policy-based governance is often necessary. Additionally, introducing acceleration mechanisms such as P2P can significantly improve the efficiency of large model loading.