#Introduction

Model as a Service (MaaS) provides a managed model-serving gateway for Alauda AI. It gives administrators a central place to publish models, manage access, configure token quotas, and monitor usage, while application developers call subscribed models through API keys.

MaaS is based on Alauda Build of Envoy Gateway and Alauda Build of Envoy AI Gateway. Envoy Gateway provides the Kubernetes Gateway API data-plane foundation, while Envoy AI Gateway adds model-aware routing and OpenAI-compatible inference traffic handling. MaaS uses Authorino for authentication.

#Model Sources

MaaS can publish inference services created with llm-d. An LLMInferenceService can be added to MaaS as a managed model and then referenced by subscriptions.

Administrators can also connect external model services. These external services are managed as model sources in MaaS and can be referenced by subscriptions in the same way as platform-hosted models.

#Administrator Experience

In the Administrator view, MaaS provides a dedicated management entry. Administrators can create subscriptions and control which users are allowed to use them.

Each subscription can bind multiple models. For every model in a subscription, administrators can configure multiple token limits with different time ranges, allowing quota policies such as short-term burst limits and longer-term monthly limits.

The MaaS management view also provides traffic dashboards for subscriptions. Administrators can inspect metrics such as request count, token usage, and response latency.

MaaS provides usage reports. Administrators can view how much each user consumed by day or by month.

#User Experience

Users access MaaS through My Subscriptions. In each subscription assigned to them, users can create, revoke, and delete API keys.

Users can also view their own usage, including request and token consumption, so they can track how their applications consume subscribed model services.