Self-hosted model operations
Self-Hosted Model Update, Rollback, and Incident Playbook
Qualify complete serving-unit changes, release with bounded exposure, roll back on a forced gate failure, and recover incidents through evidence-based closure.
- Format
- Troubleshooting
- Level
- Advanced
- Audience
- Developer, Operator, Leader
- Owner
- Project42 Editorial
- Review cadence
- Every 45 days
- Prerequisites
- A verified known-good serving-unit manifest and reproducible artifacts; Candidate qualification gates, human release authority, and bounded rollout controls; Incident roles, communication paths, recovery objectives, and an evidence-retention policy
Qualify and release the complete change
Diff the complete serving unit: model and tokenizer, runtime and drivers, image and dependencies, templates and adapters, endpoint behavior, gateway, identity and policy, networks and secrets, infrastructure, evaluation, load profile, telemetry, cost, state compatibility, and runbooks. Classify each change and hidden dependency; a model-only comparison misses many of the boundaries that determine real behavior.
Rebuild or retrieve immutable artifacts, verify provenance and license, rerun affected and regression evaluation slices, replay representative load and failure cases, confirm observability and cost, validate backward and rollback compatibility, and obtain authorized human disposition. Warm the candidate before traffic and release with bounded cohort, time, request, concurrency, cost, and error exposure.
Roll back and respond through verified postconditions
Predeclare hard stop and rollback triggers. When a trigger fires, stop or limit new work, preserve exact routing and build evidence, drain or cancel safely, reconcile requests and external effects whose outcome is unknown, and restore the complete compatible known-good unit. Verify model identity, authorization, endpoint behavior, important quality and safety checks, queues, telemetry, cost, and user-visible postconditions before declaring recovery.
For an incident, lead with impact and uncertainty. Assign authority, severity, timeline, affected users and work, narrow containment, evidence handling, communication cadence, and recovery objectives. Diagnose the responsible model, application, adapter, policy, data, tool, gateway, infrastructure, or operational boundary. Close only after recovery is stable, affected work is reconciled, required notices are complete, residual risks are accepted by authorized humans, and prevention work has an owner and date.
Task: [CHANGE OR INCIDENT AND PROTECTED OUTCOME]
Scope: [USERS/WORK, COMPLETE SERVING UNIT, ROUTING, STATE, TOOLS/EFFECTS, INFRASTRUCTURE, AND TIME WINDOW]
Permissions: [QUALIFY, APPROVE, ROUTE, STOP, ROLLBACK, ACCESS EVIDENCE, COMMUNICATE, AND CLOSE]
Exact build: [BASELINE AND CANDIDATE MODEL/IMAGE/RUNTIME/DRIVER/ADAPTER/POLICY/CONFIG/EVAL DIGESTS]
Release bounds: [COHORT, TIME, REQUEST, CONCURRENCY, COST, ERROR, AND AUTOMATIC/HUMAN STOP]
Incident ledger: [DETECTION, SEVERITY, IMPACT, UNCERTAINTY, TIMELINE, CONTAINMENT, EVIDENCE, COMMUNICATION, AND OWNER]
Verification: [CANDIDATE GATES, FORCED FAILURE, ROUTING, DRAIN/CANCEL, STATE RECONCILIATION, RESTORED POSTCONDITIONS, AND RECOVERY OBJECTIVES]
Stop conditions: [HARD GATE, UNAUTHORIZED EFFECT, DATA/SECURITY EVENT, CAPACITY/COST LIMIT, UNKNOWN OUTCOME WITHOUT RECONCILIATION, OR FAILED RESTORE]
Recovery: [STOP/LIMIT, CONTAIN, RECONCILE, RESTORE COMPLETE KNOWN-GOOD UNIT, VERIFY, COMMUNICATE, ACCEPT RESIDUAL RISK, OWN PREVENTION]Expected evidence and verification
Expected evidence includes baseline and candidate manifests, artifact and provenance verification, complete diff and compatibility decision, evaluation and load comparison, approvals, bounded routing, forced failed-gate evidence, rollback timeline, state and side-effect reconciliation, restored postconditions, incident ledger, recovery-objective results, communications, residual-risk acceptance, prevention owners, and next exercise date.
Do not close because one health check turns green or a model reports success. Stop on any hard gate, unauthorized or unknown external effect, security or data event, uncontrolled capacity or cost, unreconciled outcome, or failed restore. Maintain containment, reconcile affected work, restore or rebuild from verified artifacts, repeat access, quality, load, telemetry, and user-visible checks, communicate status, and close only with accountable human evidence.