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COMPEL Glossary / architecture-runway

Architecture runway

The reusable platform components — inference infrastructure, retrieval stack, observability, policy engine, evaluation harness — that future AI use cases inherit rather than re-build.

What this means in practice

Investing in the architecture runway ahead of use cases reduces time-to-deploy and drives per-use-case cost down the learning curve; central to scaling from pilot to portfolio.

Synonyms

platform runway , reusable architecture runway

See also

  • AI reference architecture — A canonical layered model — client, orchestration, model, knowledge, observability planes — that every AI system maps onto.
  • Agentic platform — A shared enterprise platform providing agent runtime, tool registry, memory stores, safety layer, observability, and evaluation — so individual agentic use cases inherit these components rather than build them.
  • ADR (architecture decision record) — A short, dated document capturing the context, decision, consequences, and status of an architectural decision — e.g., "we chose hybrid retrieval over naive RAG because X".

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