Red Hat AI Inference 3.5 extends MaaS governance to AKS

Red Hat has documented how the Model-as-a-Service governance layer in Red Hat AI Inference 3.5 runs on Azure Kubernetes Service, extending governed model access beyond OpenShift. The engineering walkthrough shows MaaS installed above a vLLM, llm-d and KServe inference stack on a four-node AKS cluster.

What the governance layer adds

A raw KServe inference gateway can expose an OpenAI-compatible model endpoint without authentication or rate limits. The MaaS deployment adds a second, policy-enforced gateway. Requests pass through Authorino for API-key or JWT validation and Limitador for token-rate checks before reaching the model backend.

Red Hat Connectivity Link, the productized Kuadrant layer, supplies those enforcement engines. A MaaS controller translates higher-level MaaSSubscription and MaaSAuthPolicy resources into Kuadrant authentication and token-rate-limit policies. A separate MaaS API issues, validates and revokes API keys; its PostgreSQL backend stores key hashes and subscription metadata rather than plaintext keys.

The test demonstrated the expected outcomes: a request without a key returned HTTP 401, a request with a valid key returned a model response, and requests beyond a 1,000-token-per-minute subscription limit returned HTTP 429. The gateway blocks rejected traffic before it consumes model compute.

What changes outside OpenShift

AKS does not provide the same integrated installation, certificate and identity facilities as OpenShift. The documented deployment therefore uses Helm rather than OpenShift's operator installation path, cert-manager for TLS and an external OpenID Connect provider such as Microsoft Entra ID. An operator chain selects AKS-specific manifests and deploys the MaaS controller, API, gateway and policy resources.

The model-serving path remains separate. In the example, one LLMInferenceService resource deployed Qwen3-0.6B through vLLM on an NVIDIA T4 node, while the MaaS components ran on CPU. Platform teams can keep direct inference access available or send consumers through the governed gateway.

Why it matters

The notable change is not simply that Red Hat's inference runtime works on managed Kubernetes. It is that the access-control and quota layer now follows it. That gives teams running AKS a Kubernetes-native way to issue model API keys, bind users or groups to models, enforce per-subscription token budgets and use the same policy path for locally hosted or external models.

The article is a deployment walkthrough, not performance or scale evidence. Teams evaluating it should still test identity integration, key rotation, gateway availability and quota behavior under their own traffic before treating the configuration as a production service.