The practical guide to running LLMs in production

Run language models in production without flying blind.

Evaluation, observability, cost control, security and governance for teams shipping LLM applications past the prototype stage.

The operations layer for intelligent systems in production.

Independent Vendor-neutral Built for teams running LLMs in production
01 What is LLMOps
Industry-aligned Vendor-neutral

LLMOps is the discipline of deploying, monitoring and improving large language model applications after the prototype works. It is the set of practices that turns a demo into a system you can run, measure and trust - across the full lifecycle.

LLMOps.si synthesizes how Google Cloud, IBM, Red Hat, Databricks and MLflow define it - and turns that into practical checklists, operating models and reference architectures.

The shift

From prototype to production.

A prototype answers one question. Production answers a harder one. LLMOps is the gap between the two columns.

Prototype question
Production question
Does it answer correctly in a demo?
Does it pass evals on real cases?
Is it fast enough once?
What is p95 latency under load?
Can we afford the model?
What is cost per user, feature and month?
Does RAG work today?
Is the index fresh and retrieval measured?
Is the prompt good?
Is it versioned, tested and rollbackable?
Is it safe?
Can it leak PII, ignore permissions or be injected?
Use cases

Which are you building?

Every LLM system fails differently. Find yours - its key risk, the layers it leans on, and the blueprint to follow.

Customer support chatbot

Answers customers and takes actions like lookups and refunds.

Key risk

A wrong answer becomes a wrong action, and injection can trigger it.

Internal knowledge assistant

Answers staff from internal docs, wikis and systems.

Key risk

The right answer shown to the wrong person - cross-permission leakage.

RAG search

Grounded answers retrieved from your knowledge base.

Key risk

Stale index or wrong retrieval - and hallucination when nothing matches.

Agentic workflows

Multi-step agents that plan and call tools to get work done.

Key risk

Runaway tool calls and actions taken without validation or approval.

Regulated enterprise assistant

LLM workflows in finance, health or the public sector.

Key risk

No audit trail or unexplainable decisions when a regulator asks.

Cost control

Know the bill before you ship.

Token spend is the pain point teams discover too late. Get a rough monthly estimate in seconds - then model caching, routing and budgets properly.

Open the full calculator
Estimate LLM cost
ModelExample balanced model
Input tokens / req1,200
Output tokens / req300
Cache hit rate35%
Estimated monthly spend -
Run the full calculator

Estimate only. Provider pricing, tokenization and cache rules vary.

04 Try it now

Are you actually ready for production?

Tick what is already true for your system. The full 50-point checklist ships as an interactive page and a downloadable PDF.

Production readiness 0 / 6 ready
We log every request and response Observability
We have an eval dataset and run it on changes Evaluation
We can roll back a prompt, model or config Prompt management
We have budget alerts on token spend Cost control
We have guardrails for PII and data leakage Security
A human reviews critical use cases Governance
FAQ

LLMOps, briefly

Five questions teams ask before they invest in operating LLMs. For the long answers, start with What is LLMOps?

What is LLMOps?

LLMOps (LLM operations) is the practice of running large language models reliably in production - the evaluation, observability, cost control, security and governance that sit between a working prototype and a system you can trust with real users.

How is LLMOps different from MLOps?

MLOps centres on training and deploying your own models. LLMOps usually assumes the model is a third-party API you call, so the work shifts to prompts, retrieval, evaluation, guardrails, token cost and observability around that API rather than the training pipeline.

When do I actually need LLMOps?

The moment an LLM feature faces real users. A demo only has to work once; production has to work on every input, stay within budget, fail safe, and be debuggable when it does not - which is exactly what the LLMOps layers provide.

What does the LLMOps stack include?

Eight layers: prompt management, evaluation, observability, cost control, RAG operations, security, governance and deployment. Each answers a different production question, from "can I roll back a prompt?" to "can I prove a human reviewed this?".

Do I need expensive tools to start?

No. You can start with logging every request, a small eval dataset and budget alerts using open-source tools or your existing stack. The checklist and tool directory show a minimal-to-mature path for each layer.

Independent resource

LLMOps.si is an independent, vendor-neutral resource for teams operating large language models in production - no agenda, no upsell, just the practices that hold up.