Cloud-Native AI Model Management and Distribution for Inference Workloads

Author: Wenbo Qi(Gaius), Dragonfly/ModelPack Maintainer Chenyu Zhang(Chlins), Harbor/ModelPack Maintainer Feynman Zhou, ORAS Maintainer, CNCF Ambassador Reviewer: Sascha Grunert, CRI-O Maintainer Wei Fu, containerd Maintainer The weight of AI models: Why infrastructure always arrives slowly As AI adoption accelerates across industries, organizations face a critical bottleneck that is often overlooked until it becomes a serious obstacle: reliably managing and distributing large model weight files at scale. A model’s weights serve as the central artifact that bridges both training and inference pipelines — yet the infrastructure surrounding this artifact is frequently an afterthought.