The nightmare of moving AI models from local notebook to production

We just spent two weeks trying to deploy a relatively simple RAG pipeline for a client, and everything that could go wrong did go wrong. API timeouts, weird data formatting from the client legacy database, and latency issues.

It feels like building the model or the prompt setup is just 10% of the work. The real engineering challenge is just the messy integration and scaling part. Anyone else struggling with the deployment side of AI applications lately? What are you using to handle pipeline reliability?