Model Registry Engineering: Artifact Tracking, Metadata, Lineage, Promotion Workflows, and Governance for ML Models

By Yousf Alrukh

Model Registry Engineering is a systems-oriented guide to the infrastructure that determines whether your team can answer, months after a deployment, exactly what model was running and why.

A model registry is not a file server with version numbers. It is the system of record connecting every production model back to the training run, data version, code commit, and approval that produced it - and forward to every environment it was deployed to.

Thirteen chapters cover the full registry stack:

- Registry foundations: what constitutes a complete artifact, immutable versioning, and lifecycle stages that mean something
- Artifact tracking: weights, configs, tokenizers, and checksum verification at load time
- Metadata: metrics with their evaluation protocol, dataset versions, framework and hardware context
- Lineage: training runs, data versions, code commits, and dependency locks - queryable in both directions
- Promotion workflows: candidate gates, staging parity, registry-driven deployment, and evidence-backed approval
- Governance: access control, risk-scaled review, retention policy, and complete audit trails
- Deployment integration: release pipelines, serving reconciliation, and rollback as a first-class operation
- Registry quality: completeness, consistency, staleness detection, and write-time validation
- Failure modes: orphan artifacts, wrong lineage, untracked copies, and stage drift
- Registry APIs and automation: required fields in signatures, idempotent writes, and event streams
- Multi-team registries: namespace design, shared base models, cost attribution, and visibility defaults
- Cost and scale: storage growth, deduplication, retrieval patterns, and archival economics
- Production operations: backup and restore, safe migration, correctness monitoring, and policy change management

Every section pairs the concept with the trade-off that makes it a real engineering decision, the pitfall teams most often hit, and a short set of practical checks. Each chapter closes with a worked scenario showing how these decisions interact under real pressure.

Three appendices cover architectural comparisons (centralized versus federated, content-addressed versus sequential versioning, registry-pull versus image-baked deployment), a four-level registry maturity model, and adoption sequencing for teams starting from scratch.

Written for ML platform engineers, MLOps practitioners, and technical leads responsible for what actually runs in production.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HKLJVYHJ
• ISBN13: 9798175646697
• Release Date: September 2026
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 81 Pages
• Weight: 0.27 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.2" x 6.0"