Development vs Production
Learn the critical differences between development and production environments for AI models.
Environment
Requirements
Constraints
Moving from development to production involves significant changes in requirements, constraints, and operational considerations. Understanding these differences is crucial for successful AI model deployment.
# Development vs Production Environment
environment_comparison = {
"development": {
"purpose": "Model experimentation and validation",
"characteristics": {
"data": "Clean, curated datasets",
"performance": "Focus on accuracy and metrics",
"infrastructure": "Flexible, researcher-friendly",
"timeline": "Iterative, experimental",
"monitoring": "Basic validation metrics"
},
"tools": ["Jupyter notebooks", "Local GPUs", "Small datasets", "Ad-hoc scripts"]
},
"production": {
"purpose": "Reliable service delivery to end users",
"characteristics": {
"data": "Real-world, noisy, streaming data",
"performance": "Latency, throughput, availability",
"infrastructure": "Scalable, reliable, secure",
"timeline": "24/7 operation",
"monitoring": "Comprehensive observability"
},
"requirements": ["High availability", "Security", "Compliance", "Cost efficiency"]
},
"key_differences": {
"scale": "Individual requests vs millions of users",
"reliability": "Best effort vs SLA guarantees",
"security": "Open access vs restricted, audited",
"maintenance": "Manual vs automated operations"
}
}
Deployment Strategies
Explore different strategies for deploying AI models to minimize risk and maximize reliability.
Common Deployment Strategies:
• Blue-Green: Two identical environments, switch traffic instantly
• Canary: Gradual rollout to subset of users
• Rolling: Sequential replacement of instances
• A/B Testing: Compare multiple model versions
• Shadow: Run new model alongside existing without serving traffic
Risk Mitigation:
Each deployment strategy offers different trade-offs between deployment speed, risk exposure, and resource requirements. Choose based on your risk tolerance and infrastructure capabilities.
# Deployment Strategy Patterns
deployment_strategies = {
"blue_green": {
"description": "Two identical production environments",
"process": [
"Deploy new model to green environment",
"Test green environment thoroughly",
"Switch load balancer to green",
"Keep blue as fallback"
],
"advantages": ["Instant rollback", "Zero downtime", "Full testing"],
"disadvantages": ["Double infrastructure cost", "Complex data consistency"]
},
"canary": {
"description": "Gradual rollout to increasing user percentages",
"process": [
"Deploy to 5% of traffic",
"Monitor metrics and errors",
"Gradually increase to 25%, 50%, 100%",
"Rollback if issues detected"
],
"advantages": ["Risk limitation", "Real user feedback", "Performance validation"],
"disadvantages": ["Slower rollout", "Complex monitoring", "Partial user experience"]
},
"shadow": {
"description": "New model processes requests but doesn't serve responses",
"use_cases": ["Performance testing", "Behavior analysis", "Safety validation"],
"advantages": ["Zero user impact", "Real workload testing"],
"disadvantages": ["Additional infrastructure", "Complex comparison analysis"]
}
}
Infrastructure Requirements
Understand the infrastructure components and requirements for AI model deployment.
Core Infrastructure Components:
• Compute resources: CPUs, GPUs, memory, storage
• Networking: Load balancers, CDNs, API gateways
• Storage: Model artifacts, data, logs, metrics
• Orchestration: Container platforms, schedulers
• Monitoring: Metrics, logs, traces, alerts