provenance

Three terms that get used interchangeably and answer three different questions. The one that makes them operational is the admission rule at the end: no provenance, no deploy.

Build once and move the same bytes. The moment an environment rebuilds from source, you are testing something that has never run anywhere, and no amount of pipeline output can tell you what production holds.

Code and data are the two things people pin, and they are rarely the two things that changed. The driver, the framework build, the kernel selection and the data ordering all vary underneath a pinned repository.

A model artifact is code that runs in your cluster with GPU access. Most of the supply-chain controls you already run for containers apply, and the file format adds one of its own.