NVIDIA Triton Inference Server Cheat Sheet

NVIDIA Triton Inference Server is an open-source production inference serving platform that can deploy AI models from virtually any framework — TensorRT, ONNX Runtime, PyTorch, TensorFlow, Python, vLLM, and more — through a unified, standardized API. It sits at the center of GPU-accelerated inference stacks, offering dynamic batching, concurrent multi-model execution, and deep observability through Prometheus metrics, making it the production standard for organizations running AI at scale. The key mental model to internalize is that Triton is a model management and scheduling layer, not an inference engine itself — the actual execution happens inside pluggable backends, and Triton orchestrates when, how, and on which hardware those backends run.