Building a Generative AI Platform: Architecture, Trade-offs, and the Components That Actually Matter
Most teams treating their GenAI stack as a model integration project eventually discover they've actually built—or need to build—a platform. The model is the easy part. The hard part is everything around it: routing queries to the right model, retrieving context reliably, filtering unsafe outputs, caching redundant calls, tracing what went wrong in a chain of five LLM calls, and keeping costs from tripling month-over-month as usage scales.
This article is about that platform layer. Not the model weights, not the prompts—the surrounding infrastructure that separates a working proof of concept from something you'd trust to serve a million users.
