Amazon SageMaker offers a fully managed environment for model inference, letting teams concentrate on building intelligent applications while AWS handles scaling, security, and monitoring.
The service supports real‑time endpoints, batch transform jobs, and inference pipelines that chain preprocessing, model, and post‑processing containers. Advanced optimizations such as quantization, speculative decoding, and specialized hardware like Inf1 Inferentia or GPU G4dn instances dramatically improve throughput and reduce costs.
- Choose the right instance type (Inf1 for cost‑effective CPU‑like inference, G4dn for GPU‑heavy workloads)
- Use serverless inference for intermittent traffic patterns
- Leverage built‑in containers or the SageMaker Inference Toolkit for custom environments
- Monitor latency and cost via CloudWatch metrics
Azure AI inference unifies access to a growing catalog of foundational models, enabling developers to embed advanced AI into applications with minimal friction. The platform offers a consistent REST API, SDKs for multiple languages, and hardware‑accelerated inference options.
Key capabilities include:
- Unified endpoint for chat, vision, and generative models.
- SDKs in Python, .NET, and Java for rapid prototyping.
- Scalable infrastructure with optional Maia 200 accelerators to cut latency and cost.
Looking ahead, Azure AI is expanding its model catalog, integrating more open‑source LLMs, and enhancing orchestration tools for multi‑agent workflows. Teams can expect tighter integration with Azure OpenAI and broader support for edge deployments.
Vertex AI streamlines the journey from model training to real‑time inference, offering both online and batch prediction endpoints.
- Online predictions: Deploy a model to an endpoint and invoke it via REST or gRPC for instant results.
- Batch predictions: Process large datasets stored in Cloud Storage, leveraging autoscaling for cost‑effective throughput.
- Custom routines: Plug in Sklearn or TensorFlow preprocessing/postprocessing to tailor predictions to your workflow.
Tip: Use the Vertex AI Prediction Dedicated Endpoints for high‑volume, low‑latency workloads, especially with generative models.