This talk explores the disconnect between MLOps fundamental principles and their practical application in designing, operating and maintaining machine learning pipelines. We’ll break down these principles, examine their influence on pipeline architecture, and conclude with a straightforward, vendor-agnostic mind-map, offering a roadmap to build resilient MLOps systems for any project or technology stack. Despite the surge in tools and platforms, many teams still struggle with the same underlying issues: brittle data dependencies, poor observability, unclear ownership, and pipelines that silently break once deployed. Architecture alone isn't the answer; systems thinking is.

Topics covered include:

- Modular design: feature, training, inference

- Built-in observability, versioning, reuse

- Orchestration across batch, real-time, LLMs

- Platform-agnostic patterns that scale