How do I get a model into production and keep it running?

Getting a model out of your notebook and into the real world, then keeping it alive there, is a whole discipline of its own. The overwhelm is understandable. Building the model was a contained problem. Production is open-ended, full of things that can break at any hour, and it does not stop needing you once it is live. That is a lot to hold. The way in is to separate the two jobs you are conflating. Getting a model to production is about building a reliable path from your model to real use: package it, serve it, test that it works. Keeping it there is about watching it and being ready to fix or roll back when something slips. These are different tasks with different tools, and you learn them one at a time, not all at once. Start with the smallest real deployment you can: get one model serving real requests in a simple, monitored way, even if it is modest. Get that solid before you worry about scale or elegance. Once one model lives in production and you have watched it for a while, the fear shrinks fast. You are not failing at this. You are standing at the start of a real skill. Take the first small step.