Skip to main content

Combining Semantic Kernel with Podman AI Labs

Yesterday I talked about Podman AI Labs as an alternative to Ollama to run your Large Language Models locally. Among the list of features I noticed the following one:


Mmh, an OpenAI compatible API… That made me wonder if I could use Semantic Kernel to talk to the local service.

Let’s give it a try…

I first add the minimal amount of code to use Semantic Kernel.

Compared to the same code using Ollama there are only 2 important things to notice:

  1. I adapted the URI to match the service URI running inside Podman
  1. I could set the ModelId to any value I want as the endpoint only hosts one specific model(granite in this example)

And just to proof that it really works, here are the results I got back:

    This is again a great example how the abstraction that Semantic Kernel has to offer simplifies interacting with multiple LLM’s.

    Nice!

    IMPORTANT: I first tried to get it working with the latest prerelease of Semantic Kernel(1.18.0-rc). However when I used that version it result in an HTTPException. When I used the latest stable version at the moment of writing(1.17.1), it did work as demonstrated above.

    More information

    Here is the link to a fully working example: wullemsb/PodmanAISemanticKernel: Example of combining Podman AI Lab with Semantic Kernel (github.com)

    Popular posts from this blog

    Podman– Command execution failed with exit code 125

    After updating WSL on one of the developer machines, Podman failed to work. When we took a look through Podman Desktop, we noticed that Podman had stopped running and returned the following error message: Error: Command execution failed with exit code 125 Here are the steps we tried to fix the issue: We started by running podman info to get some extra details on what could be wrong: >podman info OS: windows/amd64 provider: wsl version: 5.3.1 Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: failed to connect: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:2655: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. That makes sense as the podman VM was not running. Let’s check the VM: >podman machine list NAME         ...

    Azure DevOps/ GitHub emoji

    I’m really bad at remembering emoji’s. So here is cheat sheet with all emoji’s that can be used in tools that support the github emoji markdown markup: All credits go to rcaviers who created this list.

    Cache stampede: when our cache turned against us

    While investigating some performance issues, we ran into an ASP.NET Core API that cached a fairly expensive aggregation query for 60 seconds. Under normal load, that was fine: one request rebuilds the cache, everyone else reads from it. Under peak load, dozens of requests would arrive in that same expiry window, all see a cache miss, and all fire the same expensive query in parallel. The database didn't like that. That was the moment when our caching layer stopped helping and started hurting. A burst of requests comes in at the same time, all miss the cache, and all go hammer the database or the downstream API at once. That's a cache stampede . The cache was supposed to protect our backend, and for a few hundred milliseconds it did the opposite. Why this happens IMemoryCache.GetOrCreate (and its async sibling) looks like it protects you, but it doesn't add any locking on its own. Look at the naive version: public async Task<Report> GetReportAsync(string key) ...