How to Evaluate a RAG Release: 5 Production Gates
A RAG release moves through five independent production gates before it can take traffic. A RAG release should not ship because one aggregate score improved. It should ship when retrieval, citation support, safe refusal, tail latency and cost each stay inside a boundary the product team approved before the run. One strong metric cannot cancel a failure in another gate. That turns evaluation into a release decision instead of a dashboard. Every gate needs a versioned dataset, a named owner, an explicit hold condition and a rollback trigger. The artifact below is a release card that can travel with a candidate from staging to production. These five gates cover RAG behavior and economics. They do not replace access-control tests, privacy review, prompt-injection testing or other security checks. Treat those as separate non-compensating prerequisites, especially when the corpus contains restricted data or the application can take actions. The five-gate RAG release card Gate Requ...
