Running Chinese LLMs at Scale: A Cloud Architect's Notes

Short summary

Production architect shares 30-day comparative analysis of four Chinese LLM families (DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi, GLM) routed through a unified API gateway. DeepSeek V4 Flash wins on cost-performance ($0.25/M, 60 tokens/sec, 1.8s p99 latency), Qwen dominates breadth with 8B-397B variants including multimodal, Kimi offers premium reasoning, GLM provides mid-tier options. Includes 99.9% uptime SLAs, code examples, and multi-region routing patterns.

• •DeepSeek V4 Flash carries 60% of production load at $0.25/M with 60 tokens/sec and <1.8s p99 latency
• •Qwen offers broadest model range (8B-397B) with multimodal variants; best for diverse workloads but naming complexity is operational hazard
• •All four speak OpenAI API; routing through unified gateway eliminates lock-in and enables A/B testing

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