Where Training Meets Serving: RL Rollouts and Speculative Decoding

Part 6 of “vLLM in 2026: An Infrastructure Engineer’s Field Guide” For years, training and inference were separate worlds with separate clusters and separate teams. That boundary is dissolving. Reinforcement learning turns your inference engine into part of the training loop. Speculative decoding needs draft models that must be trained against the target you serve.

Compression Without Regret: Quantization, QAT, and Shipping Smaller Models

Part 5 of “vLLM in 2026: An Infrastructure Engineer’s Field Guide” Quantization is the closest thing inference has to a free lunch, and it isn’t free. Cutting precision shrinks weights, shrinks the KV cache, and speeds up memory-bound decode. It also risks quality regressions that don’t show up until a user finds them. This post