July 1, 2025 • Written By Chaoyu Yang and Sherlock Xu
You built an LLM-powered application. The demo went great. Leadership is impressed. Applause. Green lights. Your team is ready to ship.
But fast forward a few weeks:
These aren’t edge cases. They’re the new norms when inference scales. The problem isn’t just missing tools. It’s a deeper operational gap.
That’s where a mindset shift is needed and we call it InferenceOps. In this post, we’ll break down what it means, why it’s increasingly important, and how a comprehensive InferenceOps platform helps enterprises build reliable and scalable LLM applications in production.
InferenceOps is a set of best practices and operational principles for running, scaling, and managing inference reliably and efficiently in production.
It represents a mindset shift: from treating inference as an afterthought to managing it as a critical layer of the modern AI stack. This includes but is not limited to:
This shift empowers AI teams to move faster than those using traditional software development processes, and build differentiated AI systems to better serve their customers.
AI is no longer optional—it’s eating the world. Every business that wants to compete today needs AI at its core, and while choosing the right model is crucial, it’s your inference layer that actually delivers that model’s value to users. A strategy built solely on third-party LLM APIs can get you started quickly, but it won’t sustain a differentiated, production-grade system
Why relying on external LLM APIs falls short:
For a deeper breakdown, see Serverless vs. Dedicated LLM Deployments: A Cost-Benefit Analysis.
And that lack of customization hamstrings your ability to build lasting advantage:
Ultimately, inference quality is product quality. Mission-critical AI systems demand rock-solid performance, predictable costs, and airtight security—which only owning your inference infrastructure can deliver.
Like DevOps, InferenceOps isn’t defined by a single tool or role; it’s a set of operational principles. At its core, it shares many familiar foundations with DevOps, including:
These common practices are just the baseline. InferenceOps comes with unique requirements, especially for running and scaling LLMs in production.
In practice, enterprise AI is rarely powered by just one model. Different teams, products, and use cases often require different LLMs, each with distinct configurations and optimizations for optimal performance. One use case may need long-context summarization, and yet another may rely on high-throughput batch processing.
And it doesn’t stop at LLMs. You’ll often see small language models (SLMs), embedding models, fine-tuned models, and custom models running alongside LLMs in modern AI systems.
This results in a complex web of inference workflows around LLMs, which can quickly become operational sprawl.
A unified InferenceOps platform should provide a standardized way to manage diverse inference workflows. That means:
As your LLM inference scales, this kind of unification becomes more important. Without it, each new use case adds operational debt. With it, teams can scale responsibly, innovate faster, and maintain control.
Different LLMs require different types of compute to deliver optimal performance. Some workloads are compute-bound, others memory-bound. Some benefit from high-throughput batching on A100s, while others demand low-latency responses on edge devices. Many AI teams even combine CPUs, GPUs, and I/O-heavy workloads in the same inference pipeline for complex AI systems.
To balance availability and cost, as well as to avoid vendor lock-in, AI teams often spread inference workloads across multiple cloud regions/providers and on-prem GPU vendors. This is especially true when dealing with GPU scarcity, region-specific latency requirements, or high GPU pricing to ensure performance and control cost.
But with flexibility comes complexity. A compute-agnostic InferenceOps platform should enable AI teams to:
Running LLM inference isn’t just about launching a model server. It’s an ongoing optimization effort in engineering for better performance and cost-efficiency.
The first challenge starts at build time. Many models require compilation or runtime optimization before serving, using tools like TensorRT-LLM and TorchScript. Each model architecture comes with its own quirks. Getting this right takes effort and skipping it leaves performance on the table.
Then there’s scaling complexity. LLM workloads are not like typical web apps. They involve provisioning compute, pulling large container images, and loading model into GPUs, which makes cold starts slow and painful. See Scaling AI Models Like You Mean It for details.
As traffic grows and inference workloads get heavier, teams often begin with horizontal scaling, spinning up more GPU instances, but even that is far from enough when you’re serving large models across a multi-GPU cluster. That’s why leading AI teams are moving towards distributed LLM inference strategies, such as:
They bring better resource allocation, smarter GPU usage, lower token latency, and reduced cost per token.
However, distributed LLM inference is complex by nature. Simply spinning up more Pods on Kubernetes won’t cut it. You need purpose-built infrastructure for distributed LLM workloads. Done poorly, it leads to an over-provisioned, under-optimized system, wasting expensive GPUs while delivering sub-par performance.
A developer-friendly InferenceOps platform should abstract away the complexity and provide out-of-the-box support for these advanced optimizations.
From real-time chatbots to coding assistants, LLM inference now sits on the hot path of user-facing systems. That means production-grade reliability isn’t optional. You need:
Strict SLAs and uptime guarantees, especially for latency-sensitive workloads
LLM-specific observability, going beyond generic system metrics to include:
Robust and automated pipelines, so your team can ship new models and code updates with zero downtime
But reliability often slows down velocity. Building this kind of infrastructure from scratch is slow, expensive, and error-prone. It requires specialized knowledge in GPU orchestration, observability stacks, and distributed inference systems. This means engineers have to spend more time fighting infrastructure than experimenting or shipping new ideas.
A comprehensive InferenceOps platform resolves this tension by providing:
With operational burdens offloaded, AI teams can move faster without compromising efficiency, reliability, and security.
InferenceOps is emerging as a critical foundation for enterprise LLM strategy. With the right practices and platform in place, you can:
At Bento, we help enterprises run LLMs on their terms. With a distributed architecture and tailored inference optimization, our Bento Inference Platform enables you to deploy, scale, and manage any LLM from a single, unified interface.