Lesson 1 · 9 min
From notebook to production — the gap
A working notebook is 10% of the work. The other 90% is what nobody photographs.
The seven things a notebook doesn't have
A notebook works on your laptop. Production needs:
- Runs reliably under load — concurrent requests, queueing, backpressure.
- Scales — handles 10× traffic on Friday without falling over.
- Is observable — latency, errors, cost, accuracy, drift all measurable.
- Recovers from failure — retries, fallbacks, circuit breakers, restarts.
- Deploys safely — rollbacks, canaries, shadow traffic, no-fly windows.
- Stays cheap — autoscale, cache, batch, tier across model sizes.
- Stays secure — auth, secrets, prompt-injection defenses, output filtering.
MLOps is the discipline of doing all seven without going broke or losing your weekend.