⚡ Sphera Azure AI — Production Cheat Sheet

PoC → Prod in one page · companion to the Sphera Azure AI Blueprint Handbook

📥 Download PDF 🖨️ Print 📘 Full Handbook

🧩 Stack → Azure Map 12 components

ComponentProduction home
Claude / AnthropicAzure AI Foundry · direct API = failover
nginxFront Door+WAF → APIM; nginx only internal
AI-DLCStage gates G1–G6 in Azure DevOps
Hermes agentsAzure Container Apps · Managed Identity · MCP
GitAzure DevOps/GitHub · PR gates · secrets scan
RAGAzure AI Search (hybrid) + Jina emb/rerank
PendoKeep → feedback feeds eval set
Juno*Verify vendor → fold into agent/copilot layer
JinaEmbeddings-v3 + reranker-v1 (or Azure OpenAI emb)
DatabricksLakehouse + Unity Catalog → indexer → AI Search
MS TeamsAdaptive Cards = human-in-the-loop approvals
Azure coreEntra ID · Key Vault · App Insights · budgets

🛡️ 10 Code Rules (the "code issue" fix)

#RuleGuardrail
1Secrets → Key Vault + Managed Identitygitleaks in CI · purge history
2LLM calls via gateway wrapper onlyretry · fallback · budget · trace
3Package by layer (retrieval/ llm/ agents/ api/)80% coverage gate
4Validate I/O with Pydantic/structured outputretry-on-parse · safe degrade
5Retrieved data = untrusted, never instructionsinjection filter · tool allowlist
6Trace every call: prompt hash/tokens/cost/latencyApp Insights + tracing
7Pin prompt & model versions in a registrydeploy = release · rollback < 5 min
8Golden-set evals in CI (50→200 Q/A)no eval delta → no deploy
9Model tiering + caching + token capsAzure budget alerts 50/80/100%
10Entra ID auth + APIM JWT + RBAC rolesper-tenant data isolation

⚖️ Decision Quick Calls

DecisionCall
Model accessAI Foundry primary · direct = failover
GatewayAPIM (auth, quotas, analytics)
ComputeContainer Apps · Functions for ingestion
Vector searchAI Search serving · Databricks = curation
EmbeddingsJina vs Azure OpenAI — let evals decide
SecretsKey Vault — non-negotiable
TracingManaged tracing (Langfuse / Azure GenAI tracing)

🔍 Top 3 P0s first

🗓️ Roadmap at a glance

PhaseWeeksExit
Foundation1–2IaC landing zone deploys from one command
Harden3–6CI green + eval baseline recorded
Migrate7–10Parallel-run parity ≥ 95%
GA11–12Canary → 100% · AIDLC G1–G6 signed

🚫 Anti-patterns

✅ Go/No-Go Checklist (production approval)

SecurityReliabilityQualityOps
☐ Key Vault + MI everywhere
☐ Entra SSO + RBAC
☐ Private endpoints + WAF
☐ PII redaction + injection filters
☐ Pen test / threat model
☐ Retry/fallback chains
☐ Health checks + scale-to-zero
☐ Rollback < 5 min
☐ Load test at 3× peak
☐ Error rate < 2%
☐ Golden set ≥ 50 Q/A
☐ Groundedness ≥ 99%
☐ Citations in answers
☐ Evals in CI gate
☐ Pendo feedback loop
☐ Dashboards + alerts
☐ Cost budgets 50/80/100%
☐ Runbooks tested
☐ Trace per request
☐ AIDLC G1–G6 sign-off
Sphera Azure AI Blueprint cheat sheet · Full handbook · companion to AI-DLC & Hermes agent stack · Dark-tech edition