Vercel AI SDK Enterprise Architecture

Architecture decision records rather than a slide deck: the model access layer, the data and tenancy boundaries, the observability plane, the governance controls, and a sequenced migration path, each with the reasoning and the rejected alternatives written down. The reasoning matters more than the diagram, because it is what lets your team make consistent decisions after we leave.

With a provider abstraction at the application boundary so model choice is configuration rather than architecture, evals that let you actually compare a candidate model on your own workload, and prompts kept in version control separately from application code. Complete portability is a myth worth being honest about, since capable models differ in real ways, but the difference between a week's work and a quarter's is entirely a design decision made early.

It depends on how many teams and how similar their needs are, and both answers are defensible. A central platform pays off when several teams need the same model access, governance, and observability, and becomes a bottleneck when it is imposed on one team with an unusual requirement. We usually recommend centralising the boring, compliance-relevant layers such as access, logging, and cost accounting, while leaving application-level choices to the teams.

That is how we prefer to run these engagements. An architecture your team did not participate in designing is one they will work around within six months. We work alongside your engineers, write the decisions down, and treat internal ownership as the deliverable.