Guardrails and Safety Filters: Protecting LLM Applications from Harmful Content

Introduction: LLMs can generate harmful, biased, or inappropriate content. They can be manipulated through prompt injection, jailbreaks, and adversarial inputs. Production applications need guardrails—safety mechanisms that validate inputs, moderate content, and filter outputs before they reach users. This guide covers practical guardrail implementations: input validation to catch malicious prompts, content moderation using classifiers and LLM-based […]

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Testing LLM Applications: Unit Tests, Integration Tests, and Evaluation

Introduction: Testing LLM applications presents unique challenges compared to traditional software. Outputs are non-deterministic, quality is subjective, and the same input can produce different but equally valid responses. This guide covers practical testing strategies: unit testing with mocked LLM responses, integration testing with real API calls, evaluation frameworks for quality assessment, and regression testing to […]

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Securing Cloud Applications with Google Cloud Armor: Enterprise WAF and DDoS Protection

Google Cloud Armor provides enterprise-grade DDoS protection and web application firewall (WAF) capabilities that integrate with Cloud Load Balancing. Cloud Armor Defense Architecture WAF Rule Execution Flow Terraform Configuration resource “google_compute_security_policy” “armor_policy” { name = “cloud-armor-policy” description = “Enterprise Cloud Armor security policy” rule { action = “deny(403)” priority = 100 match { expr { […]

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Cloud Spanner Deep Dive: Building Globally Distributed Databases That Never Go Down

Introduction: Cloud Spanner represents a breakthrough in database technology—the world’s first horizontally scalable, strongly consistent relational database that spans continents while maintaining ACID transactions. This comprehensive guide explores Spanner’s enterprise capabilities, from its TrueTime-based consistency model to multi-region configurations and automatic sharding. After architecting globally distributed systems across multiple database technologies, I’ve found Spanner uniquely […]

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