Configuring Functions

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This page covers the configuration specific to functions. These settings work the same way across workloads and have their own pages:

• Resources and GPUs
• Workload Identity
• Tags
• Autoscaling
• Readiness and Shutdown
• Authentication
• Tracing Policy

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Decorator arguments

The decorator accepts a wide set of arguments that control the compute environment a function runs in: image, CPU/memory/GPU, secrets, volumes, batching, retries, rate limits, concurrency, autoscaling, and tracing. A realistic decorator usually combines several of them:

import chalkcompute

@chalkcompute.function(
    image=chalkcompute.Image.base("python:3.12-slim").run_commands(
        "pip install sentence-transformers",
    ),
    cpu="2",
    memory="4Gi",
    gpu="nvidia-l4",
    secrets=[chalkcompute.Secret.from_chalk_env("HF_TOKEN")],
    max_batching_size=25,
    max_buffer_duration=2000,
    retries=3,
)
def embed(texts: list[str]) -> list[list[float]]:
    from sentence_transformers import SentenceTransformer
    model = SentenceTransformer("all-MiniLM-L6-v2")
    return model.encode(texts).tolist()

Each argument is covered on its own page or in a section below: the shared settings listed above, Batching, Retries, Rate and Concurrency Limits, Secrets, and Volumes. For the full per-argument reference, types, and defaults, see @chalkcompute.function in the API reference.

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Secrets

Inject secrets into a function using the secrets parameter. Secrets are resolved at deploy time and made available as environment variables inside the container:

import chalkcompute
from chalkcompute import Secret

@chalkcompute.function(
    secrets=[
        Secret.from_chalk_env("OPENAI_API_KEY"),
        Secret.from_chalk_integration("prod_postgres"),
    ],
)
def call_api(prompt: str) -> str:
    import os
    openai_api_key = os.environ["OPENAI_API_KEY"]
    database_url = os.environ["DATABASE_URL"]
    ...

See Secrets for the full Secret API.

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Volumes

Attach persistent storage to a function with the volumes parameter. Each entry is a (name, mount_path) string tuple. Inside the function, read and write the volume as an ordinary filesystem path:

import chalkcompute

@chalkcompute.function(
    volumes=[("model-cache", "/models")],
    gpu="nvidia-l4",
)
def predict(text: str) -> list[float]:
    import os
    import json
    from sentence_transformers import SentenceTransformer

    cache_path = "/models/all-MiniLM-L6-v2"
    if os.path.exists(cache_path):
        model = SentenceTransformer(cache_path)
    else:
        model = SentenceTransformer("all-MiniLM-L6-v2")
        model.save(cache_path)

    return model.encode(text).tolist()

Volumes persist across invocations: data written by one call is available to subsequent calls. This is useful for caching large model weights, storing intermediate results, or sharing data between functions that mount the same volume.