Our journey in deploying the report generation models reflects the above discussion. We started out serving our models by deploying the model code and its dependencies along with the parameter checkpoints in a custom Docker image exposing a gRPC service interface. However, we soon noticed that it became error-prone to replicate the exact code and environment used by the modeling team while estimating the parameters. Moreover, this approach prevented us from leveraging high-performance model serving frameworks like NVIDIA's Triton, which is written in C++ and requires self-contained models that can be used without a Python interpreter. At this stage, we were facing a choice between attempting to export our PyTorch models to ONNX or TorchScript format. ONNX is an open specification for representing machine learning models that increasingly finds adoption. It is powered by a high-performance runtime developed by Microsoft (ONNX Runtime). While we were able to achieve performance acceleration for our TensorFlow BERT-based model using ONNX Runtime, at the time one of our PyTorch model required some operators that weren’t yet supported in ONNX. Rather than implement these using custom operators, we decided to look into TorchScript for the time being.