Architecture & Strategy
platform evaluation guide
A platform is more than a feature checklist. The crucial question is whether it can carry your operational work safely, predictably, and without creating an insurmountable maintenance or billing debt your team cannot afford.
Five Essential Questions Before Adopting Any Platform
- 1. Does it fit your current architecture without massive refactoring?
Map required network ingress, egress protocols, data models, and identity boundaries before a proof of concept becomes an unmaintainable production dependency.
- 2. Can your team change course if pricing or terms change?
Evaluate data export capabilities, API portability, and whether your code can run on standard OCI containers or alternative clouds with minimal friction.
- 3. Who owns operational health and observability?
Account for telemetry, logging costs, incident escalation, regional failovers, and upgrade maintenance windows—not merely day-one provisioning.
- 4. What enters the vendor trust and compliance boundary?
Review model data retention policies, zero-training commitments, SOC 2 Type II audit attestations, and compliance with GDPR and CCPA.
- 5. What does success look like under peak production scale?
Define measurable latency SLAs (p95, p99), token throughput, and maximum monthly budget caps before moving mission-critical production workloads.