@jellersby about (1): you can use SageMaker Serverless endpoints, see blog from @philschmid here https://www.philschmid.de/serverless-transformers-sagemaker-huggingface
You’re correct that the SM Python SDK doesn’t support serverless deployments yet, but you can follow the official instructions here, that use the boto3 generic AWS SDK Create a serverless endpoint - Amazon SageMaker 1