KServe provider can now serve models packaged as OCI images

The OpenEverest KServe provider (v0.5.0) can now serve models packaged as container images, using either the oci:// modelcar flow or oci+native:// image volumes. Images are cached on each node by the kubelet, so repeatedly scheduled replicas start faster without re-downloading weights.

Private registries are supported through imagePullSecret. Model URIs are validated up front — only hf://, s3://, pvc://, oci:// and oci+native:// schemes are accepted, so misconfigured llm models fail at deploy time instead of later inside KServe.

OCI model images are available now. To learn more, visit the v0.5.0 release notes.