PHASE 3 — CONTINUES FROM: VALIDATED GENERATION

RAG in Production — Phase 3
Control, Evaluation & Guardrails

The POC proved the happy path. Production has to prove the pipeline degrades safely, stays inside budget, is measurably working, and cannot be turned against itself — while every one of these controls adds its own latency and cost.

SCALABILITY RESILIENCE COST / LATENCY QUALITY SECURITY
Phase 1–2's forces still apply. Phase 3 adds two that are harder to dashboard but impossible to ignore.
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Orchestration & Caching

execution policy → bounded retry → deadline budget → safe reuse
The orchestrator knows when a component runs and what happens if it fails — it should never know how that component does its job. Retrieval, generation, caching, and guards stay behind stable interfaces.
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Evaluation & Observability

operational health ≠ semantic health
HTTP 200 and P95 latency can be green while groundedness and abstention accuracy quietly collapse. Production needs a parallel quality dashboard, not just an operational one.
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Guardrails

distributed trust boundaries across the full lifecycle
Not one prompt-injection filter before the model and one toxicity filter after it. Untrusted or sensitive content can enter through ingestion, user input, retrieved chunks, metadata, history, caches, tools, and output — each is its own boundary.
Orchestration
Caching
Evaluation
Observability / Feedback
Guardrails
⋯ dashed = conditional / risk-routed path
◆ diamond = decision point
Hover any box for its role. Moving dots trace the direction of execution and data through each layer.