Everywhere I look, LLMs are making news from translation to writing essays to generating images. But there's one field that always seems to be left behind: DevOps.
Over the years, we've called it many names: System Admin, System Engineer, SRE, Platform Engineer, but the work remains the same: keeping systems alive, scaling infrastructure, and fixing things when they break at 2 AM.
And yet, when you try existing LLMs for DevOps tasks, they miss the mark. They're great at summarizing novels, but not so great at troubleshooting Kubernetes pods or reading through log files.
That's why I decided to build something different.
⚡ Meet: devops-slm-v1 https://huggingface.co/lakhera2023/devops-slm-v1
A small language model trained only for DevOps tasks.
✔️ ~907M parameters
✔️Based on Qwen2.5 architecture
✔️Fine-tuned with LoRA on real DevOps examples
✔️Quantized to 4-bit so it runs smoothly even on a modest GPU
This isn't another general-purpose AI. It's built for our world: configs, CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes manifests, cloud automation, log parsing, and the everyday grind of keeping systems healthy.
💰 Why it matters
Enterprise LLMs like GPT or Claude cost thousands of dollars a month. This model costs a fraction of that ($250–$720/month) a 90–95% cost reduction, while still delivering strong DevOps-specific results.
And the best part? It runs on a single A4 GPU with just 16GB VRAM, using only 2–3GB memory during inference. That means startups, small teams, and even hobbyists can actually use it.
🛠️ Still a work in progress
I'll be honest, it's not perfect. Sometimes it drifts outside DevOps, so I've added filtering. I'm also still pruning and optimizing. But it's ready enough that I want others in the community to try it, break it, and help shape it.
👉 Model on Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/lakhera2023/devops-slm-v1
👉 Testing Notebook: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1UgTUI6AeVnSlknHoF3cEDhWLHYirghju?usp=sharing
👉Sample code: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/16IyYGf_z5IRjcVKwxa5yiXDEMiyf0u1d?usp=sharing
🤝 Let's build together
If you're working on:
✅ Small language models for DevOps
✅ AI agents that help DevOps engineers
I'd love to connect https://www.linkedin.com/in/prashant-lakhera-696119b/ .
This is just the beginning, and the more people we bring into this space, the faster DevOps will catch up with the rest of AI.
✨ DevOps has always been about solving problems with limited resources. Now, it's time we had an AI that does the same.
Top comments (0)