DevOpsNov 20247 min

Vertex Pipelines: Shipping Experiments with Guardrails

How we tightened the research-to-prod loop with Vertex AI pipelines, Terraform, and automated drift checks.

When experiments graduated from notebooks, we needed a pipeline that enforced reviews, reproducibility, and drift monitoring. Vertex AI gave us the scaffolding—but the guardrails were a team effort.

Pipeline Highlights

  • Terraform provisions Vertex Pipelines, GCS, and Artifact Registry through GitOps.
  • GitHub Actions runs unit tests, style checks, and triggers pipeline updates per branch.
  • Model Registry promotions require signed-off evaluations and drift thresholds.
  • BigQuery + Dataform produce monitoring tables that feed Grafana and PagerDuty.

Results

Model deployments dropped from quarterly to weekly without sacrificing reliability. Stakeholders can trace every experiment from prototype to production in under five clicks. Go to machine learning projects