Modular: LLM Inference Routing Needs a New Kind of Router - Part 1

AI Impact Summary

Large Language Model inference routing requires a fundamentally new approach due to the stateful nature of LLM workloads. Traditional HTTP routing strategies, designed for stateless web servers, fail to account for KV cache state, hardware specialization (prefill vs. decode), conversation continuity, and multi-step execution requirements. Modular Cloud’s orchestration layer addresses these challenges by introducing a routing system that dynamically selects pods based on these specific LLM characteristics, optimizing for prefill latency, memory bandwidth, and conversation context.