Serving and Deployment

  • Last Updated 11 August, 2026
  • by David Spuler, Ph.D.

Serving

Serving is the practical matter of how to architecture the full production application around the LLM. Other components may include a web server, application server, RAG datastore, retriever, load balancer, and more. Furthermore, there are some techniques that affect the speed of inference:

  • Batching
  • Prefill versus decoding phase
  • Scheduling
  • Load balancing
  • Frameworks (backend)

LLM Serving: Book Excerpts and Blog Articles

Free online book excerpts with full text chapters online and free PDF downloads, and the Aussie AI blog, including related articles:

  • Transformer Architectures: The Transformer was itself a major architectural advance in 2017. Since then, numerous modified Transformer architectures have been tested, and many ways to optimize Transformers have been found. ... more about Transformer Architectures »
  • Sticky sessions are a fleet-level LLM optimization method for multi-GPU inference that aims to avoid the need to send KV caches across the network. The idea is that network devices track individual sessions and send repeated requests for inference to the same server and GPU, which will already have the KV cache data for that user. This can be a simple method of avoiding the need to store KV cache cache in a datastore and then transmit it to the appropriate server when needed for a followup query. ... more about Sticky sessions »
  • Open Source Models: There are many different AI models that have been open-sourced. In many cases, both the code for the inference algorithm and the model's weights are available. Some licenses have only minimal restrictions (e.g. MIT License, Apache License 2.0), whereas other model licenses restrict usage to research or non-commercial activities.... more about Open Source Models »
  • Observability is the system management discipline of monitoring and managing components of an AI system. This is a feature mainly used in the deployment and serving of LLMs for inference tasks rather than in training models. The goal is to detect problems and slow-downs that will impact the user. Observability is required for a system with a single model, and can watch the various LLM engine components, and is even more important for multi-model or multi-agent systems ... more about Observability »
  • AI middleware is the layer in the tech stack above the LLMs. It can provide services such as prompt extensions, conversational history management, and other relatively low-level functionality. As such, middleware can operate as a wrapper around remote AI API services, or can run near a self-hosted open source LLM in the same local servers.... more about AI middleware »
  • Neoclouds are the new generation of AI-specific cloud hosting providers. Whereas the "hyperscalers" are providing both server hosting and GPU hosting, the neoclouds are newer entrants that provide services that are focused on hosting the backend of LLM applications. Generally speaking, the prices have been declining... more about Neoclouds »
  • Network optimizations are improvements to latency and efficiency that overcome network bottlenecks. Network traffic bandwidth and latency is particularly important in large LLM training jobs on GPU clusters, where the training data is sent out across the network, and all updated parameter values are returned back via the network, which gives a "bursty" shape of traffic. LLM inference can also benefit from network optimizations in distributed inference architectures and multi-step reasoning algorithms, and for the dispersement of KV cache data in various caching-based optimizations.... more about Network optimizations »
  • LLM deployment is the practical aspects of running an AI engine on a server. There are many more components needed than just the basic AI inference engine, such as schedulers, prompt managers, tool integrations, plugins, security restrictions, and many more. ... more about LLM deployment »
  • Inference frameworks are software platforms that take a model and execute it against requests from users. Many inference frameworks also provide training and fine-tuning capabilities, but not all do. Many frameworks have been open-sourced, but there are also many that remain proprietary, and there is much competition occurring in the space. ... more about Inference frameworks »
  • In-Flight Batching (IFB) is an LLM inference optimization that involves splitting queries up into "batches," to increase throughout of processing. These batches are groups of tokens with a fixed size that has strong throughput characteristics. In-flight batching is also known in research papers as "continuous batching," but AI leader NVIDIA prefers the IFB vernacular... more about In-Flight Batching (IFB) »
  • Batch API inference: A batch API is a method to submit LLM queries that are done efficiently in an offline batch mode. Several commercial LLM token providers allow reduced-cost batch operations for LLM queries. This is one way to reduce the cost of LLM usage, if a real-time response to ... more about Batch API inference »
  • Batching is the merging of multiple jobs into the queue of work for an LLM. By batching things together, maximum compute utilization is possible. The general idea is to use "continual batching" so that there are ... more about Batching »
  • Chunked prefill is an LLM optimization that processes the input prompt in chunks during the prefill phase. This can involve scheduling of prefill processing, and may also involve precomputation of ... more about Chunked prefill »
  • David Spuler, March 2024, AI Tech Stack, in Generative AI in C++, https://www.aussieai.com/book/ch5-ai-tech-stack
  • David Spuler, March 2024, Load Balancing, in Generative AI in C++, https://www.aussieai.com/book/ch7-load-balancer
  • David Spuler, 26th August, 2024, State-of-the-Art LLM Backends, Aussie AI Blog, https://www.aussieai.com/blog/state-of-the-art-llm-backends
  • David Spuler, Ph.D., March 12th, 2026, Scaling Your AI Wrapper Architecture, Aussie AI Blog, https://www.aussieai.com/blog/scaling-ai-wrapper-architectures
  • David Spuler, Ph.D., March 1st 2026 (updated), List of 600+ Low-Latency C++ Techniques, Aussie AI Blog, https://www.aussieai.com/blog/list-low-latency-techniques
  • David Spuler, Ph.D., Feb 6th, 2026 (updated), 500+ LLM Inference Optimization Techniques, Aussie AI Blog, https://www.aussieai.com/blog/llm-inference-optimization
  • David Spuler, Ph.D., September 22, 2025, List of CUDA C++ Optimization Techniques, Aussie AI Blog, https://www.aussieai.com/blog/list-cuda-optimization-techniques
  • David Spuler, Michael Sharpe, June 2025, RAG Deployment, Chapter 12, "RAG Optimization: Accurate and Efficient LLM Applications", https://www.aussieai.com/book/rag-book-12-rag-deployment
  • David Spuler, Ph.D., January 23, 2025 Low Latency Programming, Aussie AI Blog, https://www.aussieai.com/blog/low-latency-programming
  • David Spuler, Ph.D., December 9th, 2024 Humans are the Top Layer of the AI Stack, Aussie AI Blog, https://www.aussieai.com/blog/human-top-layer
  • David Spuler, Ph.D., December 9th, 2024 Reasoning is the New AI Middleware, Aussie AI Blog, https://www.aussieai.com/blog/reasoning-middleware
  • David Spuler, Ph.D., December 9th, 2024 The AI Application Layer, Aussie AI Blog, https://www.aussieai.com/blog/application-layer
  • David Spuler, Michael Sharpe, 2025, Architectures of AI Projects, Chapter 12, in "Generative AI Applications", https://www.aussieai.com/book/ai-apps-book-12-architectures-project
  • David Spuler, Michael Sharpe, 2025, Deployment Architecture, Chapter 18, in "Generative AI Applications", https://www.aussieai.com/book/ai-apps-book-18-deployment-architecture
  • David Spuler, March 2024, Chapter 5. https://www.aussieai.com/book/ch5-design-architectures Design Choices & Architectures, in book "Generative AI in C++",
  • David Spuler, March 2024, Chapter 7. Deployment Architecture, in book "Generative AI in C++", https://www.aussieai.com/book/ch7-deployment-architecture
  • David Spuler, March 2024, Chapter 54. Ensemble Multi-Model Architectures, in book "Generative AI in C++", https://www.aussieai.com/book/ch54-ensemble-research
  • David Spuler, March 2024, Generative AI in C++: Coding Transformers and LLMs, https://www.aussieai.com/book/toc PDF: https://www.aussieai.com/pdf/BOOK-Generative-AI-CPP-Spuler-2024.pdf
  • David Spuler, May 31st, 2026, Chapter 3. SOTA Inference Stacks, in book: LLM Inference Optimization: State-of-the-Art Research, Table of Contents: https://www.aussieai.com/book/llm-inference-optimization https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H3FKR39T

Research on LLM Serving

Recently, there has been an explosion of papers about the practical aspects of deployment, orchestration, and serving of LLM inference. Here's some of the papers:

Deployment

Research on LLM deployment:

Batching

Research papers on batching:

Continuous Batching

Research papers on continuous batching:

Frameworks

Research on inference frameworks as part of serving:

Serverless

Scheduling

Load Balancing

Research papers on AI load balancing:

Networking

Research papers on networking optimizations for LLMs:

AI Tech Stack

Research on AI tech stacks:

More AI Research

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