RAG pipeline
How One Retail Backend Team Survived a Live Black Friday-Scale Load Test After Migrating to an Async Vector Store Architecture (And What Enterprise Engineers Must Steal Before Q3 2026 Peak Traffic Hits)
It started with a Slack message nobody wanted to see at 11:47 PM on a Tuesday in late January 2026: "P0 , inference cluster at 94% capacity. RAG latency spiking to 18 seconds. Checkout assistant is timing out." This was not Black Friday. This was a load test.