The Infrastructure That Powers RAG Systems

Mother of AI Project, Phase 1: Week 1

Infrastructure First, AI Second

⚠️ 85% of AI projects fail before they ever reach users.

Not because of bad models because of bad infrastructure.

Hey there 👋,

Welcome to the lesson one of “The Mother of AI” - Zero to RAG series!

What is The Mother of AI Project?

A hands-on, no-fluff AI course series built by engineers who’ve shipped GenAI systems in production.

Each phase focuses on real-world systems, not toy demos. And each teaches engineering practices that scale, using tools like Docker, FastAPI, Airflow, Ollama, LangGraph, OpenSearch, Langfuse, and more.

You’ll learn how to think and build like a true AI/ML engineer through systems that matter, with patterns you can reuse in your career.

The Project Roadmap

1️⃣ Phase 1: RAG Systems
Build a personalized AI research assistant for papers (this phase!)

2️⃣ Phase 2: AI Agents
Decision-making agents using LangGraph, tools, memory

3️⃣ Phase 3: Recommendation Systems
Real-time user/item ranking, hybrid models, feedback loops

4️⃣ Phase 4: MLOps & LLMOps
Deploy, observe, evaluate, and scale ML/LLM workflows

5️⃣ Phase 5: Full App Integration + Cloud Deployment
CI/CD pipelines, infra-as-code, cost monitoring

6️⃣ Phase 6: Monitoring & Alerting Mastery
Drift detection, error logging, alert pipelines

Who Is This For?

Whether you’re:

• A student working on your first real AI project

• A Data Scientist levelling up on software + infra

• A Backend Engineer curious about RAGs or LLMs

• An ML Engineer ready to move into GenAI

This is for you.

You’ll go from scratch to a scalable production RAG system, one week at a time. For phase 1 we keep it free (blog + code are FREE), with optional paid Office Hours for live support and deep dives.

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Important: Office Hours (Optional & PAID)

The blogs and the code are free!

But if you want to go beyond the code and actually understand how these systems work in production?

We’re opening up exclusive Office Hours - every Sunday 16:00–17:30 CET where you can learn directly from two AI/ML engineers with 15+ years of combined production experience.

This is not another Zoom lecture. This is where the real learning happens:

✅ Live walkthrough of that week’s code
✅ Deeper insights into design tradeoffs, infra, and architecture
✅ Debugging support on your implementation
✅ How to go beyond and deploy these solutions in production
✅ Career + portfolio advice to extend this project into your CV

Apart from above this week's session covers:

• Infrastructure Deep Dive: Why these specific technology choices for production RAG systems

• Production War Stories: Real experiences from 15+ years of combined ML engineering at scale. Deployment patterns, monitoring strategies, and scaling approaches that actually work

• Scaling Insights: How to evolve this system from prototype to serving millions of queries

📅 Registration ends: August 9, 2025

Register for Live Sessions → https://topmate.io/shantanuladhwe/1657955

(expired as the sessions started on 10th August, we will have another cohort for phase 1 soon)

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The Problem We're Solving

"I'm drowning in research papers, and Google search isn't cutting it anymore."

You wake up, check Twitter, and see 47 new AI papers dropped overnight. arXiv shows 200+ new submissions in Computer Science. Your reading list grows from 15 to 847 papers you "should definitely read."

You want papers on "attention mechanisms in multimodal transformers" but:

• Google Scholar gives 50,000 generic results

• arXiv search misses semantic relationships

• ChatGPT gives outdated answers from 2021 training data

• Manual browsing takes hours and you still miss relevant work

  

We built RAG systems in production that serve millions of queries. This exact frustration led us to create what you're about to build: an arXiv Paper Curator that actually solves the research discovery problem.

By now, everyone knows what RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) is. If not, here's the elevator pitch:

RAG combines search with language generation to give you contextual, accurate answers from your own knowledge base instead of generic responses.

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arXiv Paper Curator

Here's what we're building together over the next 6 weeks - a production-grade RAG system that solves the research discovery problem.

You’ll build a complete research assistant that:

• Runs automated data ingestion pipelines

• Downloads and Parse 100+ academic PDFs (e.g. arXiv papers) through APIs

• Search across papers with keywords and embeddings

• Answer questions using local or foundational LLMs (Ollama, OpenAI, etc.)

• Show sources, give feedback, and maintain privacy

• A complete real production grade system!

This is what we call the ArXiv Paper Curator - an AI system that turns the flood of new AI research into structured, searchable knowledge.

What you’ll build (Technical Breakdown)

You will build from scratch - a fully local with API integration, production-grade RAG system with:

• Data Ingestion: Auto-download PDFs daily from arXiv using Airflow

• PDF Parsing: Extract structured content via Docling

• Metadata Storage: Store authors, titles, abstracts, etc. metadata in PostgreSQL

• Search Engine: Use OpenSearch with BM25 + semantic vectors (hybrid)

• Chunking Engine: Evaluate different chunking

• RAG Pipeline: Query expansion + retrieval + prompt templating

• Local LLM: Answer questions using Ollama or API (LLaMA3, OpenAI, etc.)

• Observability: Use Langfuse for prompt versioning, tracing, quality

• Frontend: Ask questions and explore results via Streamlit or Gradio

• FastAPI Backend: Async API server for integration and extensions

• Dev Best Practices: uv, ruff, pre-commit, pydantic, pytest, logging, etc.

This isn't just another tutorial project - it's a complete production system that handles real-world complexity.

But here's the catch:

Building a RAG system that actually works at scale one that can handle thousands of papers, provide sub-second responses, and give accurate answers requires production-grade infrastructure from day one.

This is why we're starting with infrastructure, not the "fun" AI parts.

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What Makes This Different

Traditional RAG Tutorials:

• Skip infrastructure entirely

• Use toy datasets and simple examples

• Deploy to Streamlit and call it "production"

• Focus on accuracy metrics only

Our Production Approach:

• Infrastructure as a first-class citizen

• You learn by learning the tools and components used in real world infrastructure

• A clear roadmap with learning materials

• Real-world data pipelines and error handling

• Modular architecture that scales

• Performance, reliability, and cost considerations

This is how you build RAG systems that actually work at companies, not just in demos.

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Why Infrastructure First?

We recently ran a RAG systems workshop at a university. Students were excited to learn about embeddings and vector search.

Three hours later, half the class was still wrestling with Docker containers and database connections. The other half had given up.

The Common Pattern We See:

• "My container keeps crashing"

• "OpenSearch won't accept connections"

• "FastAPI gives me import errors"

• "Docker says 'port already in use'"

That's when it hit us:

The gap between AI tutorials and production reality isn't the algorithms - it's the infrastructure.

For production use case, we need to make sure our systems have:

1. Robust Infrastructure - Services that don't crash under load

2. Clean Architecture - Code that teams can maintain and extend

3. Observability - Monitoring that tells you what's actually happening

4. Automation - Pipelines that run without human intervention

In real production companies, we build modular systems. You start with solid infrastructure, then add specialized components on top. That's exactly what we're doing here.

The Production Mindset:

• Infrastructure failures kill more AI projects than bad algorithms

• Modular architecture enables team collaboration and system evolution

• Automation prevents the "works on my machine" problem

• Monitoring helps you understand system behavior before things break

The Production Pattern:

• Week 1: Infrastructure foundation (APIs, databases, orchestration)

• Week 2: Data ingestion pipelines

• Week 3: Search and retrieval

• Week 4: Chunking and evaluation

• Week 5: Full RAG system

• Week 6: Production optimization

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Lesson 1: Building Your Production Foundation

This week, you're not just "setting up Docker." You're building the infrastructure backbone that every production RAG system needs.

What You'll Build

Complete Production Stack:

FastAPI Backend

• Async endpoints with comprehensive swagger documentation

• Pydantic models for request/response validation

• Dependency injection for database sessions

• Error handling middleware for production reliability

• Health check endpoints for monitoring

PostgreSQL Database

• Optimized schema for academic paper metadata

• JSONB columns for flexible document storage

• Proper indexing for fast queries

• Connection pooling for concurrent users

• Database migrations for schema evolution

OpenSearch Cluster

• Custom analyzers for scientific terminology

• Hybrid search combining BM25 + vector similarity

• Index templates optimized for document retrieval

• Cluster health monitoring and alerting

• Query performance optimization

Apache Airflow

• DAG orchestration for automated paper ingestion

• Retry logic and failure handling

• Task dependency management

• Monitoring dashboard for pipeline health

• Scalable task execution

Ollama Container

• Local LLM inference with no external dependencies

• Resource allocation and performance tuning

• API endpoints for question answering

• Privacy-first AI processing

Docker Compose Orchestration

• Service dependency management

• Health check configuration

• Network isolation and security

• Volume mounting for data persistence

• Environment variable management

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Getting Started

Ready to build production RAG infrastructure?

Here is the code for the first week:

Week1 github link - https://github.com/jamwithai/arxiv-paper-curator

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Along with the code, we've created a comprehensive Jupyter notebook that guides you through every step:

Week1 notebook - https://github.com/jamwithai/arxiv-paper-curator/tree/main/notebooks/week1

1. Clone the Repository: Get the complete codebase and Week 1 materials

2. Install Prerequisites: Python 3.12, UV package manager, Docker Desktop

3. Run the Setup: docker compose up -d to start all services

4. Open the Notebook: Launch notebooks/week1/week1_setup.ipynb

5. Explore Interactively: Test each service and follow the guided exploration

This isn't just documentation, it's your interactive guide that:

• ✅ Environment Verification: Checks Python version, Docker status, and prerequisites

• ✅ Service Health Monitoring: Real-time status of all 6 infrastructure components

• ✅ Connection Testing: Validates database connections, API endpoints, and service communication

• ✅ Interactive Exploration: Click links to explore FastAPI docs, Airflow dashboard, OpenSearch interface

• ✅ AI Model Setup: Downloads and tests Llama 3.2 (1.2GB) for local inference

• ✅ Troubleshooting Guide: Built-in diagnostics for common setup issues

• ✅ Production Insights: Tips and patterns used in real production systems

The notebook also gives you learning materials to learn the components.

Success Metrics for Week 1:

• All 6 services running and healthy

• FastAPI documentation accessible at localhost:8000/docs

• Ollama model downloaded and generating responses

• OpenSearch and PostgreSQL accepting connections

• Airflow dashboard accessible with workflows visible

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NOTE: We are also hosting weekly PAID Live Code Walkthrough and Q&A session

Register here - https://topmate.io/shantanuladhwe/1657955

(expired as the sessions started on 10th August, we will have another cohort for phase 1 soon)

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Production Code Structure

Why This Structure? This is the modular architecture pattern used in production systems. Each layer has clear responsibilities, making the system maintainable and scalable.

Layer-by-Layer Breakdown:

Routers Layer (src/routers/)

• FastAPI endpoint definitions

• Request validation with Pydantic models

• Response serialization and error handling

• API documentation and examples

• Authentication and authorization (coming in later weeks)

Services Layer (src/services/)

• Business logic implementation

• External API integrations (arXiv, OpenAI)

• Complex data processing workflows

• Caching and performance optimization

• Error handling and retry mechanisms

Repositories Layer (src/repositories/)

• Database abstraction and operations

• Query optimization and indexing

• Transaction management

• Data consistency and integrity

• Migration and schema management

Models & Schemas (src/models/, src/schemas/)

• Database models with SQLAlchemy

• API request/response models with Pydantic

• Validation rules and data transformation

• Type hints for better code maintainability

Why This Matters for Production:

• Team Collaboration: Multiple developers can work on different layers simultaneously

• Testing: Each layer can be unit tested independently

• Scalability: Swap implementations (e.g., different databases) without changing other layers

• Maintenance: Bug fixes and feature additions are contained within specific layers

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Next Week: We build automated data ingestion pipelines that fetch and process hundreds of arXiv papers daily. The real fun begins! 🚀

Follow Along: This is Week 1 of 6 in our Zero to RAG series.
Every Thursday, we release new content, code, and notebooks.

Let’s go 💪

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