Cerebrium vs Hugging Face Inference Endpoints

Cerebrium

Per-second GPU prices are public, a 94-operation OpenAPI spec covers the management API, and service account tokens expire and are limited to named projects. Deployed endpoints are callable without a token unless disable_auth = false is set, and no request rate limits, 429 handling or SLA were found in the reviewed documentation.

Hugging Face Inference Endpoints

OAuth scopes separate reading endpoints from writing them, both OpenAPI documents are public, and the unauthenticated /v2/provider route lists every instance with its hourly price. An account needs a payment method and credits before the first deployment, no rate limits or SLA were found for the management API, and the docs price table disagrees with the live list in places.

Cerebrium

1. Set disable_auth = false in cerebrium.toml before deploying. The default leaves the endpoint callable by anyone with the URL
2. Authenticate headless with CEREBRIUM_SERVICE_ACCOUNT_TOKEN. cerebrium login opens a browser
3. Raise response_grace_period for long work. It defaults to 15 minutes and async runs stop at 12 hours
4. Send ?async=true to get a run_id with HTTP 202, and add webhookEndpoint because async calls return no result to the caller
5. Check the plan before choosing hardware. A100, H100, H200, B200 and RTX PRO 6000 need Standard, and protected compute bills at twice the listed rate

Hugging Face Inference Endpoints

1. Call GET https://api.endpoints.huggingface.cloud/v2/provider first and pick an instance whose status is available. The docs table lists types the API marks deprecated or not available
2. Send X-Scale-Up-Timeout: 600 on requests to an endpoint that scales to zero, or handle 503 while the first replica starts
3. Set scaleToZeroTimeout yourself. The docs give a default of 1 hour and the OpenAPI document says 15 minutes
4. Pause or delete an endpoint when the job is done. Billing covers every minute a replica is initialising or running
5. Give the agent a fine-grained token or the read-endpoints scope unless it must deploy. Endpoints are private by default and take the same Hugging Face token as a bearer