Model obsolescence
Models evolve quickly, and the one you chose months ago is rarely the best option today. Without intelligent routing, staying current means repeated migrations, rewrites, and vendor churn.
DigitalOcean Inference Engine
The Inference Engine for production AI: every model, every modality, on one platform, with the DigitalOcean Inference Router to optimize every call.
Three problems with fragmented inference
Cost that compounds at every layer
Inference costs don’t just grow with tokens. Requests pass through multiple vendors, each adding markup on compute and orchestration, and every hop between services incurs egress. Teams end up overpaying for simple workloads or building complex routing systems just to stay efficient.
Operational blind spots
When inference runs across fragmented services, observability becomes an afterthought. Teams lose end-to-end visibility into latency by model, cost per request, and error rates, and can’t optimize what they can’t measure.
Control and Evaluate AI Inference
A unified control plane for AI inference. Define routing policies, evaluate model performance, and run experiments to continuously optimize how models behave in production.
Replace fragmented tooling with a single system for policy definition, output validation, and model testing.
Control plane for intelligence
DigitalOcean Inference Router (Public Preview)
The Inference Router is the control plane for production AI systems, unifying how models are selected and optimized across every inference call. It replaces manual routing logic with policy-driven control that adapts in real time.
Teams define routing behavior with simple policies in natural language or structured rules, enabling intent-based control over cost and latency, without hardcoding models.
- Auto-route by cost or latency
- Override any request at runtime
- Failover that just works
- Pin trajectories for agent consistency
- Runs on Serverless and Dedicated
- Full Model Catalog, one endpoint
- Evaluate routers like models
Evaluate your entire inference stack
Evaluations
DigitalOcean Evaluations enables structured LLM-as-a-Judge testing across catalog models, BYOM models, and inference routing policies, with unified visibility into quality and performance in a single run.
- Evaluate catalog models, BYOM, dedicated endpoints, and routing policies
- Custom rubrics and six pre-built metrics
- Latency and performance per run
- Save and reuse evaluation presets across model versions
- Trigger evaluations via MCP or API
- Compare candidates side by side on your own datasets
Test, compare, and move faster from idea to production
Model Playground
For rapid experimentation and comparison across all model types.
The Model Playground lets teams test text, image, audio, and video models side by side and export production-ready API code directly from their configuration.
- Every modality, side by side
- Live parameter controls
- Real-time inference with any catalog model
- Zero code to test
- Export curl or SDK instantly
- Playground to production in one click
Run AI Inference in Production
The runtime for AI inference. Execute real-time, batch, and dedicated workloads through a single system that abstracts infrastructure complexity.
Real-time inference
Serverless Inference
For production APIs, agents, and applications that require real-time responses.
- Real-time text generation, image generation, audio, and video inference
- 55+ curated open-source and frontier models
- Day 0 access to select OpenAI and Anthropic model releases
- Intelligent routing for cost and latency optimization
- Built-in observability (tokens, latency, errors, spend)
- Multimodal generation (text to image, video, speech)
- Agentic workflows via Messages API
Asynchronous AI at scale
Batch Inference
For large-scale workloads that do not require real-time latency.
- Async job-based inference via API or SDK
- 24-hour result delivery SLA
- Up to 50% cost reduction vs real-time inference
- Isolated rate limits from production workloads
- Transparent job lifecycle tracking (queued → processing → complete)
- OpenAI and Anthropic-compatible batch schema for easy migration
- Large-scale evaluation, enrichment, and moderation pipelines
Controlled model hosting
Dedicated Inference
For sustained workloads requiring infrastructure-level control and performance guarantees.
- Dedicated GPU endpoints in selected regions
- Bring Your Own Model deployment
- Custom GPU type and scaling configuration
- Pre-tuned inference stack with optimized performance defaults
- Managed orchestration and scaling without Kubernetes complexity
- High-throughput production workloads and agent systems
- Fine-tuned control over latency and performance profiles
“Serverless Inference is fantastic because we can make as many calls as we need without worrying about provisioning infrastructure. It just scales automatically.”
Carlo RuizInfrastructure Engineer, Traversal
Built for the multimodal era
Modern AI applications are not text-only. The Inference Engine natively supports:
Text generation
Image generation
Video generation
Speech generation
Vision-language understanding
The latest models — by design
Weekly open-source refreshes, one-line model switching, and Day 0 access to select frontier releases keep production teams moving without migrations.
Operational intelligence at every step
Cost optimization
Delivers 3.9x throughput vs. AWS Bedrock, $0.65/M serverless tokens, and $6/hr dedicated inference.
Observability built in
Track token usage, TTFT, latency, errors, spend, and batch lifecycle without external tooling. Ranked #1 on Artificial Analysis for performance efficiency across leading inference providers.
Platform native
One security model, one billing system, and one infrastructure layer from GPU to API.
Your inference layer is part of your stack
Run your inference workloads alongside your existing infrastructure with no stitched-together vendors, fragmented billing, or hidden complexity.
FAQs about Inference Engine
Start building with the Inference Engine
One platform for every model. One system for every workload. One engine for production AI.
