Principle:Ray project Ray Serve Control Plane Initialization
| Knowledge Sources | |
|---|---|
| Domains | Model_Serving, Microservices |
| Last Updated | 2026-02-13 17:00 GMT |
Overview
A mechanism for bootstrapping a model-serving control plane that manages deployment lifecycle, replica scheduling, and request routing.
Description
Serve Control Plane Initialization establishes the central coordinator for a model-serving system. The control plane manages the lifecycle of deployments (create, update, delete), schedules replica actors across the cluster, handles health checking, and coordinates autoscaling decisions. In Ray Serve, the control plane is implemented as a Python-based controller actor that the Java client connects to via a ServeControllerClient.
Initialization involves:
- Ensuring the Ray runtime is active (calling Ray.init() if needed)
- Creating or connecting to the singleton Serve controller actor
- Starting HTTP proxy actors on cluster nodes
- Waiting for proxies to become healthy
Usage
Initialize the Serve control plane before defining or deploying any deployments. This is a one-time operation per cluster.
Theoretical Basis
The control plane implements a centralized orchestrator pattern common in service mesh architectures. A single coordinator actor maintains the desired state of all deployments and reconciles actual state (running replicas) with desired state (configured replica counts). This is analogous to Kubernetes controllers.