Choosing the right deployment option for your model can significantly impact the success of an AI application. Selecting the best deployment option influences cost, latency, scalability, and more.
Let’s go over the most popular deployment options, with a focus on serverless deployment ( e.g.Hugging Face; Inference Endpoints) so you can unlock the full potential of your AI models. Let’s dive in!
First, let’s briefly overview the most popular deployment options: cloud-based, on-premise, edge, and the newer serverless alternative.
Traditional Methods
- Cloud-based deployment involves hosting your AI model on a virtual network of servers maintained by third-party companies like Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure. It offers scalability and low latency, allowing you to quickly scale up or down based on demand. You pay for the server even when it’s idle, which can cost hundreds of dollars per month. Larger models requiring multiple GPUs can bring up costs even higher, making this option best suited for projects with consistent usage.
- On-premise deployment involves hosting and running your AI models on your own physical servers. This option provides total control over infrastructure. However, managing your own infrastructure is complex, making it suitable for large-scale projects or enterprises.
- Edge deployment places models directly on edge devices like smartphones or local computers. This approach enables real-time, low-latency predictions. It’s not ideal for complex models requiring significant computational power.
Serverless Deployment
Serverless model deployment has emerged to address these challenges. Instead of maintaining and paying for idle servers, serverless deployment lets you focus on product development. You deploy your model in a container, and are only charged for the time your model is active—down to the GPU second. This makes serverless deployment ideal for applications with smaller user bases and test environments.
One downside of serverless systems is the cold start issue, where inactive serverless functions are “put to sleep” to save resources. When reactivated, a slight delay occurs while the function warms up.
Several providers support serverless deployment, including AWS and Hugging Face’s inference endpoints.
Hugging Face “Inference Endpoints”
- Select a model on On Hugging Face and click “Inference Endpoints” under the “Deploy” section.
- Select your desired deployment options to enable serverless functionality.
- Adjust the automatic scaling settings—for example, set it to zero after 15 minutes of inactivity.
- Once your endpoint is created, test it using the web interface.
If everything works as expected, you can proceed to using the API. To call this endpoint from your application, use the Hugging Face inference Python client. Install the huggingface_hub library, import the inference client, and specify your endpoint URL and API token. Define your generation parameters and call the text_generation method. For streaming responses, set the streaming parameter to True, enabling chunked responses.