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Production Infra Box · 5 days

RAG Pipeline for AI Startup: From 28s to 1.1s Latency

An AI startup with 12,000 active users faced a critical issue: their RAG system took 28 seconds to respond, and users were churning. In 5 days, we deployed production infrastructure that reduced latency by 25x.

5
days to launch
25×
latency reduction
99.97%
uptime in 3 months
−62%
inference cost

Context & Problem

The client is a B2B SaaS startup building an AI assistant for legal teams. The core product is a RAG system that searches 50,000+ legal documents and generates answers with citations.

At the time they reached us: the model ran on a single GPU server without load balancing, the vector database shared a host with the API, no caching, no monitoring. At peak load, latency reached 28 seconds.

Initial Stack

  • 1× GPU server (A10G, 24 GB VRAM)
  • LLM: Mistral-7B via llama.cpp
  • Vector DB: Chroma (in-process)
  • Embeddings: OpenAI text-embedding-3-small
  • Deployment: Docker Compose on single host
  • Monitoring: none

What We Did in 5 Days

Day 1

Audit & Architecture

Conducted a full infrastructure audit, measured bottlenecks (70% of time — embedding generation, 20% — vector search, 10% — LLM inference). Designed target architecture: service separation, dedicated embedding service, Qdrant instead of Chroma.

ProfilingArchitecture DesignQdrantvLLM
Day 2

Kubernetes Cluster & Networking

Deployed a 3-node Kubernetes cluster (2× CPU, 1× GPU A100 80GB). Configured Ingress, cert-manager, namespace isolation. Migrated vector database to Qdrant with re-indexing of 50,000 documents.

KubernetesQdrantHelmcert-manager
Day 3

LLM & Embedding Services

Replaced llama.cpp with vLLM using PagedAttention — throughput increased 4x. Deployed dedicated embedding service based on bge-large-en-v1.5 (local, no OpenAI API). Added semantic caching via Redis for repeated queries.

vLLMbge-largeRedisPagedAttention
Day 4

CI/CD & Monitoring

Set up GitHub Actions → ArgoCD pipeline with automatic rollback on metric degradation. Deployed Prometheus + Grafana with custom dashboards: latency percentiles, GPU utilization, cache hit rate, vector search QPS.

ArgoCDPrometheusGrafanaGitHub Actions
Day 5

Load Testing & Handoff

Ran load testing up to 500 RPS. Final metrics: p50 latency — 0.8s, p95 — 1.1s, p99 — 1.8s. Delivered full documentation, runbooks, Terraform code, and trained the client's team.

k6TerraformDocumentationRunbooks

Results After 3 Months

Before

  • Latency p95: 28 seconds
  • Uptime: ~94% (frequent crashes)
  • OpenAI embedding cost: $1,200/month
  • No monitoring or alerts
  • Deployment: manual via SSH

After

  • Latency p95: 1.1 seconds (−96%)
  • Uptime: 99.97% over 3 months
  • Embedding cost: $460/month (−62%)
  • Grafana dashboards + PagerDuty alerts
  • GitOps: ArgoCD auto-deploy in 4 minutes

"We spent 3 months trying to optimize this ourselves. InfoScale solved the problem in 5 days. Now our users don't notice any delay — they just get answers."

A
Alex M.
CTO, LegalAI SaaS (NDA)

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