Scaling

Guardrails is designed to scale with your application, from early prototypes to high-throughput production systems.

Horizontal scalability

Guardrails services are stateless and support:

• Horizontal scaling
• Load-balanced deployments
• Multi-region architectures

Rate limiting

Built-in rate limit guardrails help:

• Protect downstream systems
• Control cost
• Prevent abuse

Limits can be configured per:

• User
• API key
• Profile

High-volume workloads

For high-throughput use cases:

• Use batching where possible
• Enable cost thresholds
• Monitor execution latency
• Tune guardrail profiles for performance

Performance considerations

Execution latency depends on:

• Number of enabled guardrails
• Complexity of content
• External classifiers (if used)

Best practices:

• Start with essential guardrails
• Add additional checks incrementally
• Measure before optimizing

Caching strategies

You can safely cache:

• Profile definitions
• Guardrail configurations
• Static metadata

Do not cache validation results unless inputs are identical.

Observability at scale

As traffic grows, rely on analytics to:

• Detect regressions
• Identify slow guardrails
• Track success rates
• Monitor failure spikes

Failure handling

Guardrails supports configurable behavior:

• Block on failure
• Warn only
• Redact sensitive output
• Fail open (advanced scenarios)

Choose behavior based on risk tolerance.

Next steps

• Secure your deployment → Security
• Explore analytics and observability
• Integrate Guardrails into CI pipelines