private model hosting in VPC with audit logs

If you want private model hosting in a VPC with audit logs, you’re usually looking for a setup where:

• the model endpoint is not publicly reachable
• traffic stays on private network paths
• every request/response is logged for compliance / traceability
• access is controlled via IAM, security groups, private links, or internal load balancers

Common architecture

1. VPC / private subnets
   • Host the model on GPU instances, containers, or managed ML endpoints inside private subnets.
2. Internal-only inference endpoint
   • Expose the model through an internal load balancer or private service endpoint.
3. Authentication / authorization
   • Use IAM, service accounts, mTLS, or network-level controls.
4. Audit logging
   • Log:
     • caller identity
     • timestamp
     • endpoint/model version
     • request metadata
     • latency/status
     • optionally payloads, if allowed by policy
   • Send logs to a central system like CloudWatch / Cloud Logging / Azure Monitor / Splunk / SIEM.
5. Encryption
   • In transit: TLS
   • At rest: disk encryption and encrypted log storage
6. Network isolation
   • No public IPs
   • Restrict egress if possible
   • Use private connectivity to storage, observability, and identity services

Cloud-specific options

• AWS
  • SageMaker in VPC + private endpoints
  • EKS/ECS in private subnets
  • CloudTrail, CloudWatch Logs, VPC Flow Logs
• GCP
  • Vertex AI private endpoints / private service connect
  • GKE private clusters
  • Cloud Audit Logs, VPC Flow Logs
• Azure
  • Azure ML private endpoints
  • AKS private cluster
  • Azure Monitor / Activity Logs / NSG flow logs

Things to decide

• Do you need to log just metadata or also full prompts/completions?
• Is the model for internal users only or external tenants?
• Do you need immutable audit logs for compliance?
• Do you want managed hosting or self-hosted open-source models?

If you want, I can give you one of these next:

1. a reference architecture diagram
2. an AWS/GCP/Azure-specific design
3. a Terraform example
4. an audit logging schema for model inference requests