PLATFORMS AND MANAGED SERVICES

CHAPTER SUMMARY A managed service is run for you by another company, and a platform bundles several such services. Hosted agent platforms supply runtimes, sandboxes, and deployment, and should be checked for portability, data handling, pricing, limits, and reliability. Evaluation and observability platforms provide dashboards, alerts, and experiment tracking, but traces may hold sensitive data that should be masked. Model gateways route, cache, meter, and fail over model calls, and must themselves be secured. Buy when the problem is common and speed matters, and build when data rules, core advantage, or very high volume demand it, comparing total cost of ownership honestly. KEY TERMS REVIEW Managed service: a product another company runs for you in return for payment. Platform: a broad offering that bundles several services. Runtime: the environment in which a program runs. Telemetry: information automatically sent from a running system for study. Gateway: a single entry point between applications and outside services. Cache: a store of earlier answers reused for repeated requests. Semantic cache: a cache that reuses answers for requests with similar meaning. Data residency: a requirement that data stay in a particular place. Total cost of ownership: the full cost of a choice, including setup and upkeep.