VLLM

When prototyping generative search and agentic workflows, calling third-party APIs for embeddings and cross-encoder reranking is the rational engineering choice. You get state-of-the-art weights behind a simple POST request. Zero infrastructure overhead, zero GPU fleet management, and zero CUDA driver headaches. At production scale, however, that convenience mutates into an operational tax. Third-party APIs charge linear rent on your query traffic. Worse, they introduce compounding network jitter that eats your time-to-first-token (TTFT) budget alive. There comes a precise mathematical inflection point where self-hosting inference on dedicated Kubernetes pods stops being an infrastructure distraction and becomes mandatory systems economics. ...