FULL SERIES — PHASE 1 + PHASE 2 + PHASE 3 · TWELVE LAYERS, ONE FLOW
RAG in Production End-to-End Architecture
One continuous path from source document to approved response — the offline knowledge flow, the online request flow, the guardrails distributed across both, and the evaluation/observability loop that watches the whole thing.
A request is not successful merely because the API returned 200 — evidence must be authorized, the answer sufficiently grounded, execution inside budget, and disclosure policy-compliant.
1–5
Offline Knowledge Flow
source → parse → guard → chunk → embed → index
6–9 / 10 / 12
Online Request Flow
user → authenticated context → orchestrated pipeline → approved response
11
Continuous Quality & Operations Loop
surrounds both flows — closes back into orchestration and generation
End-to-end invariant: the evidence must be authorized and relevant, the answer sufficiently grounded/correct for the use case, execution must stay inside reliability and cost budgets, and the final disclosure must satisfy policy — all four, on every request, not just the ones a demo happens to exercise.
Phase 1 · Knowledge flow
Phase 2 · Request flow
Phase 3 · Orchestration/Cache
Evaluation / Observability
Guardrails (distributed)
⋯ dashed = feedback / conditional path
Hover any box for its role. Moving dots trace execution and data direction through the full pipeline.