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A production record, not a tutorial.

This book documents a GPU inference service running on Azure Container Apps serverless GPU (NVIDIA T4) with min-replicas=0 — where idle time costs nothing. Over 48 days of real operation, GPU charges appeared on only 12. Total cost, including the month spent building it: about $13/month.

It covers the full deployment, and every trap that cost me time getting there: the torch/transformers version conflict, a missing file that passes every startup check and fails only at inference, a startup ordering bug that produces 504s, and — on Windows — an az CLI that crashes mid-build while the build itself keeps running in the cloud.

The example workload is text-to-speech, but almost nothing here is specific to TTS. Image generation, Whisper, a small language model: swap the model, keep the structure.

The tradeoff is a five-minute cold start. This book is honest about when that disqualifies the architecture.

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Kick off your book project, get started with GhostAI, get better at marketing, or spend the day doing all three! Free live workshops on Zoom. Saturday, June 27, 2026.

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