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    12B Gemma 4 QAT Deployment with GCE, NVIDIA L4, MCP, and Antigravity CLI
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    12B Gemma 4 QAT Deployment with GCE, NVIDIA L4, MCP, and Antigravity CLI

    xbill June 16, 2026
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    This article provides a step by step deployment guide for Gemma 4 to a Google Compute Engine hosted...


    title: 12B Gemma 4 QAT Deployment with GCE, NVIDIA L4, MCP, and Antigravity CLI published: true series: agy date: 2026-06-16 13:17:24 UTC tags: mcps,qat,gemma4,nvidia canonical_url: https://xbill999.medium.com/12b-gemma-4-qat-deployment-with-gce-nvidia-l4-mcp-and-antigravity-cli-7b9f67f4db83

    This article provides a step by step deployment guide for Gemma 4 to a Google Compute Engine hosted GPU enabled system. A suite of Python MCP tools is built to simplify management of the vLLM hosted Gemma 4 deployment with Antigravity CLI.

    What is this project trying to Do?

    This project is a DevOps/SRE assistant that uses a Gemma 4 model hosted on GCE with GPU. It provides tools to provision the Docker container and deploy the model, as well as for observability and performance testing.

    This project is similar to a previous project that targeted GPU hosted Gemma4 instances on GCP:

    Gemma-SRE: Self-Hosted vLLM Infrastructure Agent

    Antigravity CLI

    Antigravity CLI is the follow-on successor to Gemini CLI- the terminal driven, agent assisted coding tool.

    Full details on installing Antigravity CLI are here:

    Getting Started with Antigravity CLI

    Testing the Antigravity CLI Environment

    Once you have all the tools in place- you can test the startup of Antigravity CLI.

    You will need to authenticate with a Google Cloud Project or your Google Account:

    agy
    

    This will start the interface:

    Full Installation Instructions

    The detailed installation instructions for Antigravity CLI are here:

    Getting Started with Antigravity CLI

    Python MCP Documentation

    The official GitHub Repo provides samples and documentation for getting started:

    GitHub - modelcontextprotocol/python-sdk: The official Python SDK for Model Context Protocol servers and clients

    Where do I start?

    The strategy for starting MCP development for model management is a incremental step by step approach.

    First, the basic development environment is setup with the required system variables, and a working Antigravity CLI configuration.

    Then, a minimal Python MCP Server is built with stdio transport. This server is validated with Antigravity CLI in the local environment.

    This setup validates the connection from Antigravity CLI to the local server via MCP. The MCP client (Antigravity CLI) and the Python MCP server both run in the same local environment.

    Setup the Basic Environment

    At this point you should have a working Python environment and a working Antigravity CLI installation. The next step is to clone the GitHub samples repository with support scripts:

    cd ~
    git clone https://github.com/xbill9/gemma4-tips
    

    Then run init.sh from the cloned directory.

    The script will attempt to determine your shell environment and set the correct variables:

    g2-4-12B-qat-L4-devops-agent
    source init.sh
    

    If your session times out or you need to re-authenticate- you can run the set_env.sh script to reset your environment variables:

    g2-4-12B-qat-L4-devops-agent
    source set_env.sh
    

    Variables like PROJECT_ID need to be setup for use in the various build scripts- so the set_env script can be used to reset the environment if you time-out.

    Model Management Tool with MCP Stdio Transport

    One of the key features that the standard MCP libraries provide is abstracting various transport methods.

    The high level MCP tool implementation is the same no matter what low level transport channel/method that the MCP Client uses to connect to a MCP Server.

    The simplest transport that the SDK supports is the stdio (stdio/stdout) transport — which connects a locally running process. Both the MCP client and MCP Server must be running in the same environment.

    The connection over stdio will look similar to this:

    # Initialize FastMCP server
    mcp = FastMCP("Self-Hosted vLLM DevOps Agent")
    

    Running the Python Code

    First- switch the directory with the Python version of the MCP sample code:

    ~/gemma4-tips/g2-4-12B-qat-L4-devops-agent
    

    Run the release version on the local system:

    make install
    Processing ./.
    

    The project can also be linted:

    xbill@penguin:~/gemma4-tips/g2-4-12B-qat-L4-devops-agent$ make lint
    ruff check .
    All checks passed!
    ruff format --check .
    7 files already formatted
    mypy .
    Success: no issues found in 7 source files
    Success: no issues found in 6 source files
    

    Getting Started with Gemma 4 on GPU

    The Official vLLM repo also has Gemma4 specific information:

    Releases · vllm-project/vllm

    Gemma 12B

    Gemma 12B is the latest model in the Gemma4 series. More details are available here:

    Introducing Gemma 4 12B: a unified, encoder-free multimodal model

    and here:

    Gemma 4 12B: The Developer Guide

    NVIDIA L4 on GCE

    The NVIDIA L4 support on Google Cloud Compute Engine is documented here:

    Introducing G2 VMs with NVIDIA L4 GPUs | Google Cloud Blog

    Quantization-Aware Training (QAT)

    One of the key issues with deploying models is available GPU memory based in the hardware footprint. Along with the new 12B model release- new versions of the model that use QAT to reduce the memory requirements have been released:

    Gemma 4 QAT models: Optimizing model compression for mobile and laptop efficiency

    QAT Model Versions

    What are the differences between the versions on Hugging Face?

    > what is the difference between google/gemma-4-12B-it-qat-q4_0-unquantized and https://huggingface.co/google/gemma-
      4-12B-it-qat-q4_0-gguf and google/gemma-4-12B-it-qat-w4a16-ct
    
    ▸ Thought for 1s, 602 tokens
      Analyzing Gemma QAT Variations
    
    ● Read(/home/xbill/gemma4-tips/gpu-12B-qat-L4-devops-agent/GEMINI.md) (ctrl+o to expand)
    
      Here is a comparison of the three Gemma 4 QAT (Quantization-Aware Training) model configurations:
    
      ### 1. google/gemma-4-12B-it-qat-q4_0-unquantized 
    
      • Format: Unquantized, high-precision weights (usually float16 or bfloat16) extracted directly from the QAT
      training pipeline.
      • Target Engine: Standard deep learning/fine-tuning framework runtimes (e.g., PyTorch, Transformers, Jax).
      • Primary Use Case:
          • Serving as a high-precision reference baseline.
          • Custom downstream quantization, compilation, or MLX conversion.
          • Research, fine-tuning, or running Speculative Decoding (where this serves as the primary model alongside
          its matching MTP assistant/draft model).
    
    
      ### 2. google/gemma-4-12B-it-qat-q4_0-gguf 
    
      • Format: GGUF (specifically quantized using the standard q4_0 4-bit method).
      • Target Engine: Local CPU, Apple Silicon, or consumer GPU engines (e.g., llama.cpp , Ollama, LM Studio).
      • Primary Use Case:
          • Zero-setup local execution with minimal memory requirements.
          • Running LLMs efficiently on consumer-grade hardware.
    
    
      ### 3. google/gemma-4-12B-it-qat-w4a16-ct 
    
      • Format: Compressed Tensors format ( -w4a16-ct ), which stores 4-bit weights while performing computation using
      16-bit activations.
      • Target Engine: High-performance, high-throughput cloud inference engines (specifically vLLM or SGLang ).
      • Primary Use Case:
          • High-concurrency cloud deployments utilizing GPU accelerators (e.g., NVIDIA L4).
          • Optimizing GPU memory usage and improving inference speed while maintaining near-lossless model accuracy
          via QAT.
    
      ──────
      ### 📊 Summary Reference Table
    
       Checkpoint Configuration | Serialization Format | Target Platform | Primary Engine
      ---------------------------|---------------------------|----------------------------|----------------------------
        ...-qat-q4_0-unquantized | Unquantized ( BF16 / FP16 | Custom compilation / | Transformers / Speculative
                                 | ) | research | Drafts
        ...-qat-q4_0-gguf | GGUF (4-bit weight) | Local Desktop/Server | llama.cpp / LM Studio /
                                 | | (CPU/GPU) | Ollama
        ...-qat-w4a16-ct | compressed-tensors (4- | Cloud GPU Deployments | vLLM / SGLang 
                                 | bit/16-bit) | |
    
      For more details on QAT architecture and configuration, see GEMINI.md.
      ──────
      ### Summary of Work
    
      • Reviewed Context: Analyzed the workspace documentation GEMINI.md to compare the unquantized, GGUF, and
      compressed-tensors configurations.
    

    More documentation is available here:

    Gemma 4 model overview | Google AI for Developers

    MCP stdio Transport

    One of the key features that the MCP protocol provides is abstracting various transport methods.

    The high level tool MCP implementation is the same no matter what low level transport channel/method that the MCP Client uses to connect to a MCP Server.

    The simplest transport that the SDK supports is the stdio (stdio/stdout) transport — which connects a locally running process. Both the MCP client and MCP Server must be running in the same environment.

    In this project Antigravity CLI is used as the MCP client to interact with the Python MCP server code.

    Antigravity CLI mcp_config.json

    A sample MCP server file is provided in the .agents directory:

    {
      "mcpServers": {
        "gpu-devops-agent": {
          "command": "python3",
          "args": [
            "/home/xbill/gemma4-tips/gpu-12B-qat-L4-devops-agent/server.py"
          ],
          "env": {
            "GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT": "aisprint-491218",
            "GOOGLE_CLOUD_LOCATION": "us-east4",
            "VLLM_BASE_URL": "https://gpu-12b-qat-l4-devops-agent-289270257791.us-east4.run.app",
            "MODEL_NAME": "/mnt/models/gemma-4-12B-it-qat-w4a16-ct"
          }
        }
      }
    }
    

    Validation with Antigravity CLI

    The final connection test uses Antigravity CLI as a MCP client with the Python code providing the MCP server:

    MCP Servers
    
    Plugins (~/.gemini/antigravity-cli/plugins)
    > ✓ google-dev-knowledge Tools: search_documents, answer_query, get_documents
       ✓ gpu-devops-agent Tools: save_hf_token, get_vllm_endpoint, list_vertex_models, list_bucket_models,
                           analyze_cloud_logging, +26 more
    

    Model Lifecycle Management via MCP

    The MCP tools provide a complete suite of agent-oriented operations for managing vLLM deployment on GCE, Cloud Run or a TPU.

    Overview of MCP tools :

      Here is the output of the get_help tool:
    
      ### 🛠️ GCP Gemma 4 SRE Agent Help & Configuration
    
      You can configure this MCP server using the following environment variables:
    
      GCP Configuration:
    
      • GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT : Your GCP Project ID.
          • Current Value: comglitn 
      • GOOGLE_CLOUD_LOCATION : The GCP Region/Location.
          • Current Value: us-east4 
      • GOOGLE_CLOUD_ZONE : The GCP Zone for GCE VM deployment.
          • Current Value: us-east4-a 
      • BUCKET_NAME : GCS Bucket used to store model weights.
          • Current Value: comglitn-bucket 
    
      General serving:
    
      • MODEL_NAME : Default Hugging Face repository or GCS path.
          • Current Value: google/gemma-4-12B-it-qat-w4a16-ct 
      • VLLM_BASE_URL : The explicit URL of your vLLM GCE service. (If not set, it is auto-discovered via GCE VM
      external IP)
          • Current Value: Not set (auto-discovering) 
    
      ### ℹ️ Active Mode Summary
    
      The server is running in GCP GCE VM mode targeting a g2-standard-4 host VM with NVIDIA L4 GPU.
    
      ### 🧰 Available MCP Tools
    
      Below is a summary of the tools exposed by this SRE/DevOps agent:
    
      #### 🐳 Infrastructure & Deployment
    
      • start_gce : Starts an existing GCE instance, or provisions a new one if none exists.
      • status_gce : Checks GCE instance status.
      • stop_gce : Stops GCE instance.
      • check_vllm : Checks the status of the vLLM container and engine running on the GCE instance.
      • deploy_vllm : Deploys vLLM to GCP GCE g2-standard-4 (NVIDIA L4) VM instance.
      • destroy_vllm : Deletes the GCP GCE vLLM VM instance.
      • status_vllm : Checks GCE instance status.
      • update_vllm_scaling : Scales GCE instance type vertically.
      • get_vllm_deployment_config : Generates the gcloud compute command and startup script.
      • get_vllm_gpu_deployment_config : Generates a GKE manifest for GPU (NVIDIA L4).
      • check_gpu_quotas : Checks GPU/Accelerator quotas for a region.
      • get_vllm_endpoint : Returns the current active vLLM endpoint URL.
    
      #### 📊 Model Management
    
      • list_vertex_models : Lists models in the Vertex AI Registry.
      • list_bucket_models : Lists model weights in GCS bucket.
      • save_hf_token : Securely saves a Hugging Face API token to Secret Manager.
      • get_vertex_ai_model_copy_instructions : Instructions to copy model from Vertex AI Model Garden to GCS.
      • get_huggingface_model_copy_instructions : Instructions to download model from Hugging Face and upload to GCS.
      • get_huggingfacehub_download_path : Resolves local cache path using huggingface_hub.
    
      #### 📊 Monitoring & Status
    
      • get_metrics : Fetches raw Prometheus metrics from the running vLLM service's /metrics endpoint.
      • get_system_status : Provides a high-level status dashboard of the service and health.
      • get_endpoint : Verifies connectivity and returns the active service URL.
      • get_model_details : Retrieves detailed model metadata and engine state from /v1/models .
      • verify_model_health : Deep health check by querying the model with a simple prompt and measuring latency.
    
      #### 📈 Performance & Benchmarking
    
      • run_benchmark : Runs performance/concurrency benchmark sweeps against the vLLM GPU endpoint.
    
      #### 💬 Interaction & Diagnostics
    
      • query_gemma4 : Primary tool to query the self-hosted model with standard chat message format.
      • query_gemma4_with_stats : Queries the model and returns streaming performance statistics (TTFT, throughput).
      • query_vllm : Direct text completions querying tool.
      • analyze_cloud_logging : Fetches logs from GCP Logging and analyzes them using the model.
      • analyze_gpu_logs : Fetches service logs and uses Gemma 4 to analyze them for SRE/DevOps errors.
      • suggest_sre_remediation : Suggests remediation plans for SRE errors using the model.
    

    Deploy The Model

    The MCP server tools are used to deploy the model to GCE with GPU:

    deploy the model
    

    Checking System status

    The status can be checked with an MCP tool:

    > get_system_status
    
      The system status has been successfully updated and is fully healthy:
    
      ### 🌀 GPU vLLM System Status
    
      • vLLM Health: 🟢 Online (http://34.82.63.29:8080)
      • Hosting Status: 🟢 Running ( gpu-12b-qat-l4-devops-agent )
      👉 Next Step: Use query_gemma4 to interact with the model.
    

    Cross Check The Deployed Model

    Once the model starts locally- the MCP tool allows for model verification:

    > verify_model_health
    
      I will execute the verify_model_health tool function from server.py to run a model query benchmark and
      measure latency.
    
    ● Bash(python3 -c "import asyncio; from server import verify_model_health; print(asyncio.run(veri...) (ctrl+o to
    expand)
    
      The model health check has successfully passed:
    
      • Model: google/gemma-4-12B-it-qat-w4a16-ct 
      • Response: "Yes, I am working and ready to help! How can I assist you today?" 
      • Latency: 0.84 seconds 
      • Status: 🟢 PASSED
    

    and model details:

    > get_active_models
    
      I will call the get_model_details tool function from server.py to fetch details on the active served models.
    
    ● Bash(python3 -c "import asyncio; from server import get_model_details; print(asyncio.run(get_mo...) (ctrl+o to
    expand)
    
      The active model currently served by vLLM is:
    
      ### 🧩 Active Model Details
    
      • Model ID: google/gemma-4-12B-it-qat-w4a16-ct 
      • Object: model 
      • Owner: vllm 
      • Endpoint Status: Healthy ✅
    

    and the endpoint:

    > get_endpoint
    
      I will call the get_endpoint tool function in server.py to retrieve and verify the active API endpoint.
    
    ● Bash(python3 -c "import asyncio; from server import get_endpoint; print(asyncio.run(get_endpoin...) (ctrl+o to
    expand)
    
      The active validated vLLM endpoint is:
    
        http://34.82.63.29:8080
    
      • Status: 🟢 Online (HTTP 200)
    

    and status:

    > get status
    
      I will fetch the current status of the GCE VM instance and the vLLM engine to provide a unified summary.
    
    ● Bash(make status ZONE=us-west1-a) (ctrl+o to expand)
    
      Here is the complete status of the serving stack:
    
      ### 🖥️ GCP GCE VM Instance Status
    
      • Instance Name: gpu-12b-qat-l4-devops-agent 
      • Instance State: 🟢 RUNNING 
      • Zone: us-west1-a 
      • Machine Type: g2-standard-4 (1x NVIDIA L4 GPU, 24GB VRAM)
      • Public IP Address: 34.82.63.29 
    
      ### 🌀 vLLM Serving Status
    
      • Endpoint: http://34.82.63.29:8080 
      • Health Endpoint ( /health ): 🟢 Healthy (HTTP 200)
      • Active Model: google/gemma-4-12B-it-qat-w4a16-ct 
      • Model State: Loaded and listening to requests.
    

    Check the Cloud GCE VM

    Once Deployed — the model is visible as a standard VM:

    Review the Model

    Check the model details:

    > what are the model details?
    
      I will query the GCE VM vLLM server configuration details by pulling the model information and runtime settings.
    
    ● Bash(python3 -c "import asyncio; from server import get_model_details; print(asyncio.run(get_mo...) (ctrl+o to
    expand)
    
      The active model details on the self-hosted GCE server are:
    
      ### 🧩 Served Model Details
    
      • Model Identifier: google/gemma-4-12B-it-qat-w4a16-ct 
      • Quantization Type: Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) with 4-bit weights and 16-bit activations ( w4a16 ) using
      the native compressed-tensors ( -ct ) serialization format.
      • Serving Backend: vllm (v0.22.1rc1 nightly build) utilizing the Marlin linear kernel ( MarlinLinearKernel for
      CompressedTensorsWNA16 ) for fast 4-bit weight decoding.
      • GPU Hardware: Single NVIDIA L4 GPU (24GB VRAM) hosted on a GCP Compute Engine (GCE) g2-standard-4 VM instance.
      • VRAM Configuration:
          • gpu-memory-utilization : 0.95 (allocates 95% of GPU memory to vLLM cache)
          • kv-cache-dtype : fp8 (8-bit quantized key-value cache to save memory and maximize concurrency)
      • API Server Health: 🟢 Healthy (HTTP 200) at http://34.82.63.29:8080 
    

    Once everything is online — you can send queries to the Model:

    > query_gemma4_with_stats what is gemma?
    
      I will run the model query tool with performance stats to answer "what is gemma?" and retrieve latency and
      throughput metrics.
    
    ● Bash(python3 -c "import asyncio; from server import query_gemma4_with_stats; print(asyncio.run(...) (ctrl+o to
    expand)
      The query is running in the background. I will await the results.
    
      Here are the performance metrics and response for the query:
      ### 📊 Performance Stats
    
      • Model: google/gemma-4-12B-it-qat-w4a16-ct 
      • Time to First Token (TTFT): 0.198s 
      • Total Generation Time: 23.326s 
      • Tokens per Second: 26.89 tokens/s 
      • Total Tokens generated: 622 
    
      ### 💬 Model Response
    
      The term Gemma most commonly refers to a family of lightweight, state-of-the-art open models developed by Google 
      DeepMind.
    
      To understand what Gemma is, it helps to look at it through three different lenses: its relationship to Gemini,
      its technical nature, and its purpose.
    
      #### 1. The Relationship to Gemini
    
      Gemma is built using the same technology, infrastructure, and research used to create Gemini, Google’s most
      capable AI model:
    
      • Gemini is a "closed" model (available via API or Google products).
      • Gemma is an "open" model (available for developers to download and run on their own hardware).
    
      #### 2. Key Characteristics
    
      What makes Gemma unique in the AI landscape are these three traits:
    
      • Open Weights: This means that the internal weights are shared with the public, allowing developers to build
      upon, fine-tune, and customize the model.
      • Lightweight & Efficient: Unlike massive models that require supercomputers to run, Gemma is designed to be
      small enough to run on a single GPU or even a high-end laptop.
      • Responsible AI: It includes safety filtering to ensure the models are less likely to generate harmful or toxic
      content.
    
      #### 3. Versions and Sizes
    
      Gemma comes in different "sizes" (parameter counts) to balance compute requirements with reasoning capabilities:
    
      • Gemma 2B: A tiny model capable of running on mobile devices or laptops.
      • Gemma 7B/9B/27B/12B/31B: Mid-to-large sized models that are highly capable at reasoning, coding, and creative
      writing while still being manageable for individual developers.
    
      #### 4. Who is it for?
    
      Gemma is designed primarily for:
    
      • Developers: Who want to build apps (like a personal assistant or a specialized chatbot) without paying fees to
      use the Gemini API.
      • Researchers: Who want to study how Large Language Models (LLMs) work and experiment with fine-tuning them on
      specific datasets.
      • Enterprises: Companies that want to run AI on their own private servers to ensure data privacy.
    
      #### Summary Table
    
       Feature | Gemini | Gemma
      -------------------------------------|-------------------------------------|-------------------------------------
       Accessibility | Closed (API/Web) | Open Weights (Downloadable)
       Size | Massive (Very Large) | Small to Medium
       Hardware | Google's Supercomputers | Local GPUs / Cloud / Laptops
       Best For | Consumer apps, complex reasoning | Development, Research, Local Use
    

    Benchmark the Local Model

    The local model was benchmarked:

    The benchmark sweep has completed successfully. Here are the compiled results across all combinations of context
      window sizes and concurrency levels:
    

    The analysis is reviewed:

    > summarize benchmark results
    
      ### 1. Request Success Rate (Reliability)
    
      • 100% Success Rate: Maintained across all context lengths (4 to 8,162 tokens) for workloads up to 1,024         
      concurrent users.
      • 16K Context Window: Success rate remains at 99.7% under 1,024 concurrent users, dropping to 47.7% at 2,048
      users due to KV-cache memory pressure.
    
      ### 2. Latency (Prefill & Queue Waiting)
    
      • Low Concurrency (1-32 Users): Very responsive; average latency stays below 1.2 seconds even with large context
      sizes (4K).
      • High Concurrency (256-1024 Users): Queue wait times begin to dominate. Latencies scale linearly:
          • 128 Context: scales from 0.26s (1 user) to 5.05s (256 users) to 18.47s (1024 users).
          • 16K Context: scales from 5.61s (1 user) to 9.96s (256 users) to 33.26s (1024 users).
    
      ### 3. Throughput (Requests per Second)
    
      • Peak Throughput: Reaches 75.8 requests/sec under small context windows (4 tokens) at 128 users.
      • Large Contexts (16K): Throughput saturates at approximately 14 to 16 requests/sec for concurrencies of 128
      users and above.
    
      Detailed tables and the performance plot can be viewed in the generated gce_benchmark_results.md file.
    

    This is visualized:

    Compare to Other Deployments

    The GCE deployment was reviewed:

      Here is a summary of the performance comparison for serving Gemma 4 QAT on an NVIDIA L4 GPU:
    
      ### 1. GCP GCE VM vs. AWS EC2 (VM vs. VM)
    
      • Performance: Almost identical. Average latency at 1024 users (1K context) is 19.91s on GCE and 19.90s on AWS.
      • Extreme Load: AWS EC2 holds a slight edge under 2048 concurrent users at 16K context window with a 61.8%       
      success rate compared to 47.7% on GCP GCE VM.
    
      ### 2. VMs (GCE/EC2) vs. GCP Cloud Run (VM vs. Serverless)
    
      • Throughput: Dedicated VMs scale to significantly higher peak throughput. GCE VM peaked at 75.8 RPS and AWS at
      93.3 RPS, whereas Cloud Run was capped at 40.3 RPS.
      • Scalability: Cloud Run degrades much earlier under high concurrency. At 2048 users (16K context), its success
      rate plummets to 22%, while GCE VM maintains 47.7%.
      • Overhead: Cloud Run's gVisor container sandboxing and routing layers add a 3–4 second latency penalty under
      load, in addition to cold start delays.
    

    Cost Analysis

    The current Google Cloud pricing is used to evaluate the cost per token:

    > summarize gce_cost_analysis.md
    
      Here is a summary of the cost analysis for running the g2-standard-4 GCE VM instance with an NVIDIA L4 GPU:
    
      ### 1. Core Monthly Costs (24/7 Run-time)
    
      • On-Demand Compute: ~$547.50 / month ($0.75 / hour).
      • Balanced Storage (150 GB): $15.00 / month ($0.10 / GB).
      • Total On-Demand Baseline: ~$562.50 / month.
    
      ### 2. Cost Optimization Options
    
      • Spot Instances (~70% savings): Reduces compute costs to ~$167.90 / month ($0.23 / hour).
      • Dynamic VM Scheduling (10h/day, weekday-only): Reduces compute costs to ~$165.00 / month by leveraging the
      agent's programmatic start_gce and stop_gce tools to power down the VM during idle hours.
    
      ### 3. Value Proposition
    
      At $0.23 - $0.75 / hour, a single L4 GPU supports up to 1024 concurrent users with 100% success rate for context
      lengths up to 8K. This makes GCE self-hosting highly cost-efficient compared to managed pay-per-token API
      endpoints.
    
     I have prepared a cost comparison between GCP GCE, AWS EC2, and Google Cloud Run. The detailed cost matrix and
      workload analysis are stored in platform_cost_comparison.md.
    
      Here is a summary of the cost comparison:
    
      ### 📊 Hourly & Monthly Cost Matrix (NVIDIA L4 GPU)
    
       Hosting Option | GCP GCE ( g2-standard-4 ) | AWS EC2 ( g6.2xlarge ) | GCP Cloud Run (Gen2 Serverless)
      --------------------------|---------------------------|------------------------|---------------------------------
       On-Demand Hourly | ~$0.75 / hr | ~$0.98 / hr | ~$0.946 / hr (Active)
       Spot Hourly | ~$0.23 / hr | ~$0.27 / hr | N/A (Not supported)
       Monthly (24/7 On-Demand) | ~$547.50 / mo | ~$715.40 / mo | ~$690.58 / mo (Warm min=1 )
       Monthly (24/7 Spot) | ~$167.90 / mo | ~$197.10 / mo | N/A
       Idle / Scale-to-Zero | No (Manual scheduling) | No (Manual scheduling) | Yes (0 active cost when idle)
    
      ### ⚖️ Cost Analysis by Workload Type
    
      1. Intermittent / Burst Use (GCP Cloud Run)
          • Best for: Occasional workloads (e.g., automated log audits triggered once daily).
          • Advantage: Scales down to 0 instances when idle, incurring $0.00 compute charges.
          • Disadvantage: Idle scale-down triggers a cold start (~1–2 mins) on subsequent calls. Keeping the model warm
          ( min-instances=1 ) costs ~$690.58/mo.
      2. Non-Production / Batch Workloads (Spot Instances)
          • Best for: Development and testing.
          • Advantage: GCP GCE Spot VMs are the cheapest way to serve continuously ($0.23/hr vs AWS Spot's $0.27/hr),
          bringing the total monthly bill to ~$182.90 (with storage).
          • Disadvantage: Preemptible; instances can be shut down with a 30-second warning.
      3. Steady-State Production Workloads (On-Demand VMs)
          • Best for: 24/7 SRE agents or alert response bots requiring sub-second response times.
          • Advantage: GCP GCE VMs are ~23% cheaper than AWS EC2 g6.2xlarge ($547.50/mo vs. $715.40/mo) and ~20%     
          cheaper than keeping Cloud Run warm.
    

    And Price/Performacne?

    The winner is…

      ### 🏆 Summary: GCP GCE VM ( g2-standard-4 ) has the best overall price/performance for steady-state workloads.
    
      We can measure price/performance by calculating Peak Throughput (Requests Per Second) per Dollar of hourly cost:
    
       Metric | GCP GCE VM ( g2-standard-4 ) | AWS EC2 ( g6.2xlarge ) | GCP Cloud Run (Gen2 Serverless
      -------------------------|------------------------------|------------------------|-------------------------------
       Peak Throughput | 75.8 RPS | 93.3 RPS | 40.3 RPS
       Hourly Rate (On-Demand) | $0.75 / hr | $0.98 / hr | $0.946 / hr (Warm)
       Steady-State Price/Perf | 101.1 RPS per $ | 95.2 RPS per $ | 42.6 RPS per $
       Hourly Rate (Spot) | $0.23 / hr | $0.27 / hr | N/A
       Spot Price/Perf | 329.6 RPS per $ | 345.6 RPS per $ | N/A
      ──────
      ### ⚖️ Recommendations
    
      1. For Steady-State Serving (24/7): GCP GCE VM
          • Winner: GCP GCE VM
          • Why: It yields the highest value for on-demand serving (101.1 RPS/$ vs AWS's 95.2 RPS/$). It avoids the
          gVisor sandbox and container virtualization overhead of Cloud Run, which cuts throughput in half (40.3 RPS)
          while cost remains high ($0.946/hr) if kept warm.
      2. For Development & Batch Serving: AWS Spot or GCP Spot
          • Winner: AWS EC2 Spot (by a small margin on throughput value), though GCP GCE Spot is cheaper in absolute
          monthly dollars ($167.90 vs $197.10).
          • Why: Both spot options offer spectacular price/performance (over 320+ RPS per dollar), making them ideal
          for offline training, benchmarking, or non-critical diagnostic sweeps.
      3. For Highly Intermittent Auditing: GCP Cloud Run (Serverless)
          • Winner: GCP Cloud Run (with scale-to-zero active)
          • Why: If your SRE agent only runs a log diagnosis task 2 to 3 times a day and sits idle the rest of the time,
          Cloud Run's scale-to-zero feature brings active costs to $0.00, making it the most cost-effective choice
          overall, despite lower peak throughput and the ~1–2 minute cold start.
    
    

    Summary

    The strategy for using MCP for Gemma 4 GPU deployment with Antigravity CLI was validated with a incremental step by step approach.

    A minimal stdio transport MCP Server was started from Python source code and validated with Antigravity CLI running as a MCP client in the same local environment. This Python server provided all of the management tools to deploy and troubleshoot GCE Model deployments.

    Tags

    mcpsqatgemma4nvidia

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