A comprehensive production guide for self-hosting LLMs covering the full stack: hardware selection (H100, A100, RTX 4090, B200) with VRAM sizing math, quantization trade-offs (AWQ vs GPTQ vs GGUF), OS-level tuning for inference, Docker/NVIDIA Container Toolkit setup, inference engine comparison (vLLM, TGI, TensorRT-LLM, llama.cpp, Ollama), and observability pipelines using Prometheus and Grafana. Includes a cloud vs on-prem cost model showing break-even at ~10M tokens/day, production-ready code for a vLLM server with FastAPI auth/rate-limiting wrapper and Node.js client, and a detailed pre/post-deployment checklist. Targets platform teams and DevOps engineers with existing GPU and containerization experience.
Table of contents
Table of ContentsThe Business Case for Local LLMsThe 2026 GPU Stack: Choosing Your HardwareThe Software Stack: From OS to Container OrchestrationInference Engines: Choosing and Configuring Your Serving LayerObservability: Monitoring Your Local LLM in ProductionProduction Deployment ChecklistBuilding for What's NextSort: