VLLM

← Series hub Next → Answer-first: Self-hosting Small Language Models (2B–14B) with Go hybrid routing and vLLM serving reduces enterprise API costs by up to 65%, eliminates PII privacy risks, and delivers specialized domain performance matching 100B+ models. For the past two years, enterprise AI adoption has been dominated by a singular architectural pattern: API integration with massive, closed-source models (Frontier LLMs). While this API-Centric model allows for rapid prototyping, it becomes a severe liability when scaled to production workloads handling sensitive company data. ...

Prompt Engineering vs Fine Tuning vs RAG: Complete 2026 Decision Guide Prompt Engineering vs Fine Tuning: Executive Decision Framework Answer-first: In the prompt engineering vs fine tuning evaluation, prompt engineering offers rapid prototyping with zero setup cost, whereas fine tuning Small Language Models (SLMs) via QLoRA bakes domain knowledge into weights, reducing TTFT latency under 250ms and cutting API token spend by 90%. Small Language Models (SLMs, 1B–8B parameters) combined with fine-tuning and local inference (vLLM) rival proprietary frontier LLMs on specialized domain tasks at a fraction of the cost. The playbook below rests on three architectural choices: ...

Prerequisite: Familiarity with the concepts introduced in Part 7 — Agentic Memory Long Term. Review it first if the terminology in this part is unfamiliar. Part 8 — Inference Optimization: vLLM, PagedAttention & Speculative Decoding In enterprise AI infrastructure, model serving cost is dictated by GPU VRAM utilization and generation throughput (tokens per second per GPU). Running large language models (LLMs) under high concurrency presents a severe memory management challenge: Managing the KV Cache. ...