Serving security, reliability, and operations

Security and access

Authenticate clients and workloads, authorize model and operation, constrain administrative interfaces, protect model storage and secrets, isolate networks and tenants, validate request limits, and record policy decisions. Separate model-use permission from runtime-administration permission — a user who is allowed to query a model should not automatically be able to reconfigure the endpoint that serves it.

Reliability

Define service indicators, objectives, capacity limits, health criteria, drain and restart behavior, fallback policy, and recovery targets. A process being alive is not proof that the intended model is loaded, responsive, authorized, and producing acceptable behavior — liveness and correctness are different claims and need different checks.

Operations

Correlate platform, runtime, endpoint, routing, model, policy, and release signals so an operator can answer "what exact configuration served this request" without reconstructing it from several disconnected systems. Record which complete configuration served a request, and alert on saturation, repeated load failures, unexpected routes, policy bypass, evidence gaps, and behavioral regressions — not only on infrastructure-level symptoms like CPU or memory.

Change

Evaluate runtime, driver, firmware, quantization, model, routing, configuration, and hardware changes under representative load before they reach production. Promote a known, evaluated candidate, verify its deployed identity matches what was approved, monitor a defined window after rollout, and retain a tested rollback path — see Evaluation and release gates and Controlled change and versioning.

Operational runbooks should cover capacity exhaustion, unhealthy replicas, corrupted model storage, revoked artifacts, unavailable policy, evidence failure, security incidents, rollback, and restore. A runbook that has never been rehearsed is a draft, not an operational control.