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Production Deployment Architecture

Here's the production-grade Docker Compose setup — the single most requested pattern from the free tutorials. This is what Chapter 1 goes deep on.

The Problem with `docker run`

Every free tutorial shows docker run -p 8880:8880. That's fine for testing. In production, you need: restart policies that work, health checks that actually verify the model is loaded, GPU allocation that survives driver updates, and logging that doesn't fill your disk.

Production Compose File

# docker-compose.prod.yml
services:
  diffusiongemma:
    image: vllm/vllm-openai:latest
    runtime: nvidia
    environment:
      - NVIDIA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=all
    deploy:
      resources:
        reservations:
          devices:
            - driver: nvidia
              count: 1
              capabilities: [gpu]
    command:
      - "--model"
      - "google/diffusiongemma-26B-A4B-it"
      - "--trust-remote-code"
      - "--gpu-memory-utilization"
      - "0.92"
      - "--max-model-len"
      - "65536"
      - "--max-num-seqs"
      - "8"
    ports:
      - "8880:8000"
    volumes:
      - ./model-cache:/root/.cache/huggingface
      - ./logs:/var/log/vllm
    restart: unless-stopped
    healthcheck:
      test: ["CMD", "curl", "-f", "http://localhost:8000/health"]
      interval: 30s
      timeout: 10s
      retries: 3
      start_period: 120s

Why This Works

• restart: unless-stopped — survives reboots, but won't restart-loop if you intentionally stop it
• healthcheck with start_period: 120s — gives the model time to load before marking unhealthy. Most setups use 30s and get false negatives
• gpu-memory-utilization: 0.92 — leaves 8% for CUDA context overhead. Pushing to 0.95+ causes OOM on long contexts
• max-num-seqs: 8 — caps concurrent requests so one user can't starve others
• Volume mounts for cache + logs — model downloads persist across container rebuilds. Logs are accessible outside the container

Chapter 1 continues in the full guide with:

• Nginx reverse proxy — TLS termination, rate limiting, multi-endpoint routing
• systemd service unit file — zero-downtime restarts, resource limits, log to journald
• logrotate config — prevent 50GB+ of vLLM logs
• Multi-GPU deployment with tensor parallelism
• Pre-deployment checklist: 5 things most people miss that cause 3AM outages