Introduction
From startups to enterprises, businesses of all sizes are quickly realizing that using custom, fine-tuned, or open-source AI models has become essential for building competitive products.
At the same time, using these models in production presents challenges around reliability, security, and performance. While AI providers like Anthropic and OpenAI can serve as a starting point, they fall short for enterprise-grade solutions. Organizations need greater control over model behavior, data privacy, and scalability—without sacrificing performance.
Choosing the right hosting solution is key to overcoming these challenges. Where you run your inference workloads—on a cloud platform, your own virtual private cloud (VPC), or using a hybrid approach—directly impacts the effectiveness of your AI systems. This choice is particularly important when it comes to AI inference, the process of running models to generate responses or predictions from new data.
Effective inference is vital for real-time services, seamless user experiences, and data-driven decision-making. As businesses increasingly rely on AI to drive results, the need for efficient, secure, and scalable hosting solutions has never been more urgent. Companies with superior infrastructure will hold a competitive edge.
Baseten is laser-focused on providing the most performant and customizable deployment options tailored to organizational needs. Unlike other infrastructure providers, with Baseten, you can run your inference workloads in your cloud, our cloud, or both. As a result, our customers achieve lower costs, industry-leading latencies, and 100% uptime—delivering powerful user experiences.
For CIOs, CTOs, VPs of AI, and IT leaders, understanding the benefits of different hosting solutions is critical to ensuring performance, compliance, and cost-efficiency for AI-powered products. In this guide, we’ll explore the differences between cloud, self-hosted, and hybrid hosting solutions, and how they can play a key role in successful AI initiatives.
AI Model Inference on Baseten
Baseten is the leading machine learning inference platform for performant, reliable, and secure model inference. Trusted by companies like Bland AI, Descript, and PicnicHealth, our mission is to empower companies with the most customizable model deployment solution coupled with the lowest latency. With blazing-fast cold starts, effortless autoscaling, and heightened observability, we provide our customers with record-breaking latencies, throughput, and time to market.
Part of our mission involves offering customers the right solution for their needs, whether that’s the full control of a Self-hosted setup, the convenience of Baseten Cloud, or a Hybrid approach that blends the best of both.
Understanding Baseten's hosting options: Self-hosted, Cloud, and Hybrid
Baseten Self-hosted offers enterprises complete control over their AI infrastructure and data, making it ideal for organizations with stringent compliance requirements or those utilizing their existing resources.
Key advantages:
Data control and security: Provides complete control over data residency, handling, and storage, ensuring consistency with security and compliance policies like GDPR, HIPAA, and other industry-specific standards.
Customization and integration: Allows tailored configurations and integrations with existing enterprise systems, facilitating custom workflows.
Credit utilization: Utilize your existing GPU allocation, spend commit, and credits with cloud providers like AWS and GCP.
Baseten Cloud
Baseten Cloud is designed for organizations that prioritize operational simplicity and rapid time to market. It provides a managed, scalable environment for deploying AI models, ideal for enterprises looking to minimize infrastructure costs and management while focusing on development.
Key advantages:
Scalability: Offers elastic scaling to accommodate varying workload demands, ensuring that resources are available when needed.
Cost Efficiency: Operates on a pay-as-you-go model, which helps manage costs effectively and particularly benefits businesses with fluctuating AI workloads.
Operational simplicity: Managed services reduce the burden of maintaining and upgrading infrastructure, allowing internal teams to focus on innovation and development.
Baseten Hybrid
Baseten Hybrid combines Self-hosted and Cloud to provide ultimate flexibility. Utilize internal resources whenever they’re available; seamlessly flex on Baseten Cloud whenever necessary. Spend down existing cloud commitments and gain multi-cloud flexibility with full resource management.
Key advantages:
Cloud elasticity: Deploy workloads wherever there’s capacity with zero bandwidth needed to make them compliant with AWS, GCP, or another cloud provider.
Cost efficiency: Utilize internal resources whenever capacity permits and supplement them with Baseten’s pay-as-you-go compute, eliminating the need for additional hardware purchases.
Data control and security: Run sensitive workloads on your VPC with complete control over data handling and storage.
