Eight decisions from a Bedrock pilot to production

Establish the first four inputs

Define the task. Agree what users should complete, how success is judged and what the system must not do. Produce a sample set and acceptance rubric.
Confirm data. Inventory documents, sensitivity, ownership, update frequency and authorized users. Produce a data-flow map and source list.
Prepare the account. Confirm account ownership, Region, model activation, workload identity and least-privilege permissions. Produce a configuration record without secrets.
Evaluate models. Compare supported candidates on the same inputs, including refusal, latency and cost. Produce a decision record with exclusions.

Build the application and its controls

Choose the smallest architecture. Use direct generation for self-contained tasks, retrieval for changing organizational knowledge, and tools for business actions. Retrieval and tools can be combined; they are not exclusive project tracks.
Integrate and test. Implement timeouts, bounded retries, stream completion handling and a stable response contract. Test incomplete output, unavailable dependencies and unauthorized requests as well as happy paths.
Review security and cost. Verify document authorization, permitted processing locations, logging retention, action approvals and budget monitoring. Check feature support for the actual model and API rather than assuming Guardrails applies everywhere.
Release and hand over. Roll out to an agreed audience with rollback, failure routing and named operational owners. Deliver configuration references, runbooks, evaluation results and the unresolved-issue list.

Use evidence at each gate

Inputs to the final review are the eight artifacts, business acceptance and operational readiness. A passed model test cannot substitute for failed access-control tests or an undefined incident owner. Decide the schedule from dependencies and review results; there is no universal implementation duration.

Official references

Documentation checked: 17 October 2026. The instructions are reference guidance; no cloud API was called for this article.