LLMOps Platform Engineering

Design and operate an internal LLM platform that supports rapid experimentation without compromising reliability, cost, or compliance.

When to Use This Skill

• Building an internal platform for teams to deploy and manage LLM-powered features
• Designing CI/CD pipelines that include model evaluation gates
• Setting up A/B testing infrastructure for model versions
• Creating Kubernetes-based model serving infrastructure
• Establishing governance workflows for model promotion

Prerequisites

• Kubernetes cluster with GPU node pools (or cloud inference API access)
• Container registry (Harbor, ECR, GCR, or ACR)
• CI/CD system (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or Argo Workflows)
• Observability stack (Prometheus + Grafana + OpenTelemetry)
• Model registry (MLflow or custom metadata store)

Outcomes

• Standardized path from experiment to production
• Safe model rollout with quality and safety gates
• Repeatable infra modules for inference, vector DB, and observability
• Clear ownership model across platform, app, and security teams

Reference Architecture

1. Control Plane: model registry, prompt/version catalog, policy checks, eval pipeline.
2. Data Plane: inference gateway, vector database, cache, feature store.
3. Ops Plane: telemetry, alerting, SLO dashboards, cost analytics.
4. Security Plane: IAM boundaries, secret rotation, content filters, audit logs.

Model Promotion Pipeline

# .github/workflows/model-promotion.yaml
name: Model Promotion Pipeline
on:
  workflow_dispatch:
    inputs:
      model_name:
        description: "Model identifier"
        required: true
      model_version:
        description: "Model version to promote"
        required: true
      target_env:
        description: "Target environment"
        required: true
        type: choice
        options: [staging, production]

jobs:
  evaluate:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4

      - name: Run quality evaluation suite
        run: |
          python -m evals.run \
            --model "${{ inputs.model_name }}:${{ inputs.model_version }}" \
            --suite quality \
            --output results/quality.json

      - name: Run safety evaluation suite
        run: |
          python -m evals.run \
            --model "${{ inputs.model_name }}:${{ inputs.model_version }}" \
            --suite safety \
            --output results/safety.json

      - name: Run latency benchmark
        run: |
          python -m evals.benchmark \
            --model "${{ inputs.model_name }}:${{ inputs.model_version }}" \
            --concurrent-users 50 \
            --duration 300 \
            --output results/latency.json

      - name: Gate check - quality
        run: |
          python -m evals.gate_check \
            --results results/quality.json \
            --threshold-file thresholds/quality.yaml

      - name: Gate check - safety
        run: |
          python -m evals.gate_check \
            --results results/safety.json \
            --threshold-file thresholds/safety.yaml

      - name: Gate check - latency
        run: |
          python -m evals.gate_check \
            --results results/latency.json \
            --threshold-file thresholds/latency.yaml

      - name: Upload eval evidence
        uses: actions/upload-artifact@v4
        with:
          name: eval-results-${{ inputs.model_version }}
          path: results/

  approve:
    needs: evaluate
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    environment: ${{ inputs.target_env }}
    steps:
      - name: Record approval
        run: |
          echo "Approved by: ${{ github.actor }}"
          echo "Model: ${{ inputs.model_name }}:${{ inputs.model_version }}"
          echo "Target: ${{ inputs.target_env }}"
          echo "Time: $(date -u +%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ)"

  deploy:
    needs: approve
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4

      - name: Deploy canary
        run: |
          kubectl set image deployment/${{ inputs.model_name }}-canary \
            model=${{ inputs.model_name }}:${{ inputs.model_version }} \
            -n ai-${{ inputs.target_env }}

      - name: Wait for canary validation (15 min)
        run: |
          python -m canary.validate \
            --deployment ${{ inputs.model_name }}-canary \
            --namespace ai-${{ inputs.target_env }} \
            --duration 900 \
            --quality-threshold 0.85 \

…