LLMOps Certification Guide
Certifications Available
| Cert / Course | Provider | Cost | Level |
|---|
|---------------|----------|------|-------|
| **DeepLearning.AI LLMOps** | Coursera | Free | Intermediate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Weights & Biases MLOps Course | W&B | Free | Intermediate |
| DataTalks.Club MLOps Zoomcamp | DataTalks | Free | Intermediate |
| Google Professional ML Engineer | $200 | Advanced | |
| AWS Certified ML Specialty | AWS | $300 | Advanced |
LLMOps Core — Key Components
python
# HIGH-THROUGHPUT SERVING WITH vLLM
# vLLM uses PagedAttention for efficient memory management
# docker run --gpus all -p 8000:8000 vllm/vllm-openai \
# --model mistralai/Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3
from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(base_url="http://localhost:8000/v1", api_key="token")
response = client.chat.completions.create(
model="mistralai/Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3",
messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Hello"}]
)
# vLLM: 24x higher throughput than HuggingFace naive serving
# FINE-TUNING WITH LORA (Low-Rank Adaptation)
from peft import LoraConfig, get_peft_model, TaskType
lora_config = LoraConfig(
task_type=TaskType.CAUSAL_LM,
r=16, # rank: 8-64 typical (lower = fewer params)
lora_alpha=32, # scaling: usually 2x rank
target_modules=["q_proj", "v_proj"], # which layers to adapt
lora_dropout=0.05,
)
peft_model = get_peft_model(base_model, lora_config)
peft_model.print_trainable_parameters()
# trainable: 4,194,304 || all: 7B (0.06% trained, 94% frozen)
# RAGAS EVALUATION
from ragas import evaluate
from ragas.metrics import faithfulness, answer_relevancy, context_recall
from datasets import Dataset
eval_data = Dataset.from_dict({
"question": ["What is LangChain?"],
"answer": ["LangChain is a framework for LLM applications"],
"contexts": [["LangChain helps build LLM-powered apps using chains"]],
"ground_truth": ["LangChain is a framework for building LLM applications"],
})
scores = evaluate(eval_data, metrics=[faithfulness, answer_relevancy, context_recall])
# faithfulness: 0-1, measures hallucination (higher = less hallucination)
# context_recall: 0-1, were the right chunks retrieved?
# LANGSMITH TRACING
import os
os.environ["LANGCHAIN_TRACING_V2"] = "true"
os.environ["LANGCHAIN_API_KEY"] = "ls__xxxx"
# All LangChain chain/agent calls now traced automatically in LangSmithLLMOps vs Traditional MLOps
TRADITIONAL MLOPS LLMOPS ADDITIONS
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Model versioning (MLflow) + Prompt versioning (LangSmith)
Training pipeline + Fine-tuning pipeline (LoRA/PEFT)
Model registry + Foundation model selection & eval
Serving (Triton/TorchServe)+ LLM serving (vLLM, TGI, Ollama)
Monitoring (accuracy) + Hallucination rate, token cost, latency
A/B testing + Prompt A/B testing
Feature store + Vector store / RAG knowledge base
Data versioning (DVC) + RAG document versioningLLMOps Stack Reference
SERVING:
vLLM: GPU-based, PagedAttention, OpenAI-compatible API
TGI: HuggingFace Text Generation Inference, production-grade
Ollama: local/edge, runs 7B-70B quantised models on CPU/GPU
OpenAI/Anthropic: managed API (no infra, pay per token)
FINE-TUNING:
LoRA: train 0.1% of params, near full-model quality
QLoRA: 4-bit quantised base + LoRA = fits in consumer GPU
PEFT library: Hugging Face library for all parameter-efficient methods
TRL/SFTTrainer: supervised fine-tuning + DPO/RLHF tooling
EVALUATION:
RAGAS: RAG-specific: faithfulness, context recall, answer relevancy
LLM-as-judge: use strong LLM to score open-ended responses
Braintrust: evaluation + tracing platform
Promptfoo: CLI-based LLM evaluation framework
MONITORING:
LangSmith: tracing + datasets + playground + evaluations
Langfuse: open source alternative to LangSmith
Arize: ML + LLM observability platform
Datadog: LLM Observability (traces, cost, quality metrics)
EXPERIMENTS:
MLflow: model versioning, experiment tracking (classic MLOps)
W&B: experiment tracking + model registry + sweeps
Comet: ML experiment managementProduction Deployment Checklist
SERVING:
Define SLA: latency (p50/p95/p99) + availability (99.9%)
Rate limiting per user/tenant
Token budget enforcement (prevent runaway costs)
Fallback to smaller model on primary failure
QUALITY GATES:
Automated eval on golden dataset before every deployment
Regression test: new prompt/model must not degrade on existing test set
A/B test: route 5% traffic to new version, compare metrics
MONITORING METRICS:
TTFT (time to first token) | TBT (time between tokens)
Cost per 1K tokens per endpoint
Hallucination rate (track with RAGAS/LLM-judge pipeline)
User satisfaction (thumbs up/down, follow-up questions)Revision Notes
LLMOPS ADDS TO MLOPS:
Prompt management | RAG pipelines | Token cost tracking | Hallucination monitoring
Foundation model selection | LoRA fine-tuning | LLM-as-judge evaluation
FINE-TUNING DECISION:
Use RAG when: knowledge changes frequently, need citations
Use fine-tuning when: consistent style/format/persona, domain-specific vocabulary
Use both: fine-tuned base + RAG for knowledge (most powerful)
LORA: rank decomposition — inject small trainable matrices, freeze 99.9% of model
VLLM: PagedAttention = efficient KV cache management = 24x throughput vs naive
KEY METRICS:
Faithfulness: answers grounded in context (no hallucination)
TTFT: time to first token (user experience for streaming)
Cost/request: crucial for unit economics
