Model Registry

ELI5 - The Vibe Check

A model registry is the version control system for trained models instead of code. Every time someone fine-tunes or retrains a model, it gets logged with its metrics, its lineage, and a stage label like 'staging' or 'production.' Without one, you end up with a folder full of files named model_final_v2_ACTUALLY_final.pt and nobody knows which one is actually serving traffic.

Real Talk

A model registry is a centralized system for versioning, storing, and tracking the lifecycle of trained models, recording metadata such as training data, hyperparameters, evaluation metrics, and deployment stage. Tools like MLflow Model Registry, Weights & Biases, and Vertex AI Model Registry let teams promote a specific model version from staging to production and roll back cleanly if a new version regresses.

When You'll Hear This

"Promote v14 to production in the model registry once the eval gate passes." / "Nobody could tell which weights were live because we had no model registry."