Production RAG: Deployment Patterns and Best Practices

Moving RAG from prototype to production requires careful attention to reliability, scalability, monitoring, and operational best practices.

Production Considerations

• Reliability: Error handling, fallbacks, retries
• Performance: Caching, optimization, latency targets
• Monitoring: Quality metrics, performance tracking, alerting
• Scalability: Horizontal scaling, load balancing
• Security: Access control, data privacy, audit logging

Deployment Patterns

• Microservices architecture
• API gateways and rate limiting
• Vector database clustering
• LLM API failover strategies
• Comprehensive logging and observability

Build for production from day one, not as an afterthought.