PLATFORMS AND MANAGED SERVICES

EXAMPLES Example 1: A hosted agent platform. A small team has written an agent that runs code to analyze spreadsheets. Running that code safely requires a locked-down sandbox, and building one would take weeks. They choose a managed platform that offers sandboxed execution, deployment, and scaling. They spend their time improving the analysis instead of the plumbing. They also confirm that the platform lets them export their agent definition, in case they must move later. Example 2: An evaluation and observability platform. A team plugs their agent's traces into a third-party dashboard service. Within a day, they have charts of error rates, cost per task, and slowest steps, along with alerts when costs spike. They also use the service to track evaluation scores for each new release. Before turning it on, they mask email addresses and phone numbers in the traces, so personal data never leaves their systems. Example 3: A gateway. A company places one routing layer between its applications and several model providers. Repeated identical requests, such as a common greeting, are answered from the cache, which saves money. Usage is metered per team so each department sees its own bill. When the main provider has an outage one afternoon, traffic fails over to a backup provider and most users notice nothing. Example 4: Buy versus build. A startup with three engineers buys a managed observability platform because they cannot spare anyone to build one. A large bank, in contrast, has strict data residency rules that forbid sending customer conversations to outside companies. The bank builds an in-house equivalent despite the extra effort, because the rules leave no alternative. Both decisions are reasonable, because their situations differ.