Prague, 12 February 2026: Representatives of CERIT-SC, a key component of the national e-infrastructure e-INFRA CZ, took part in the expert conference Containers in Practice 2026. This year’s edition focused on critical topics in modern IT—from digital sovereignty and security to the integration of artificial intelligence into containerized environments.
Conference highlight: AI within the e-INFRA CZ infrastructure
While many institutions rely on external APIs provided by global technology vendors, CERIT-SC operates its own scalable Kubernetes platform with more than 3,000 CPU cores, 80 GPU accelerators, and petabytes of storage, serving the needs of the Czech scientific community.
Lukáš Hejtmánek presented the evolution of the environment for inference in detail—from the very first chatbot experiments to the current architecture, which now serves more than a thousand users and runs state-of-the-art models such as DeepSeek V3.2, Kimi K2.5, and Mistral 3 Large.
The presentation offered a deep technical insight into a solution running on hardware platforms, including NVIDIA DGX B200 and B300 systems. Lukas Hejtmánek described the infrastructure’s progression from a simple Ollama setup to advanced inference frameworks such as vLLM and SGLang. He also explained how GPU memory optimization and resource sharing are handled using CUDA MPS.
Beyond the core infrastructure, the talk showcased a rich ecosystem of higher-level services—as Open WebUI and LiteLLM for access management and rate limiting, integrations with “vibe coding” tools (Deepsite.ai), AI-enabled Jupyter Notebooks, support for modern developer tools (Claude Code, Codex), and the implementation of MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers. These provide models with contextual data, for example, for logical reasoning, documentation search, and solving mathematical tasks.
A comprehensive view of the container ecosystem
The conference addressed a broad range of current challenges. Tomáš Vondra (CTU) opened a discussion on the philosophy of open-source software and European digital sovereignty. Lukáš Lauryn from SUSE presented strategies for avoiding vendor lock-in in cloud-native environments.
Lukáš Smiga (Red Hat) introduced the complete lifecycle of AI systems within the OpenShift AI platform – from model training to automated deployment. Vojtěch Mareš and Michal Charvát focused on Kubernetes security and identity management for AI agents. David Rusín (NetApp) presented solutions for persistent storage, while Vojtěch Dušátko warned about pitfalls in cluster recovery and highlighted the importance of a “rebuild-ready” approach.
From theory to practice
CERIT-SC’s participation in the conference reaffirmed its leadership in advanced container technologies. While elsewhere AI infrastructure is often discussed only in theory, in Brno, large language models are already running in production—fully under the control of Czech infrastructure, with transparent access management and scaling precisely tailored to the needs of the domestic research community.
References:
- Blog: https://blog.e-infra.cz/
- More details: https://docs.cerit-sc.cz/en/docs/ai-as-a-service/introduction
