Pre-Release Architecture Audit

Launch day is when every assumption you never tested gets tested at once. Traffic arrives in a burst instead of a curve. A provider API throttles or returns errors. A marketing email lands earlier than planned. Someone, somewhere, sends a flood of junk requests, whether malicious or merely a misconfigured client. The AI model is rarely the component that fails first. The surrounding system usually is: queues, rate limits, retries, secrets, dashboards nobody watches, and an on-call rota nobody agreed on.…