Conceptual explanation of the features and architectural choices that significantly impact the total cost of ownership (TCO) and deployment complexity.
Primary Drivers
1. High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR)
Moving from a single-node PoC to a multi-site HA cluster doubles the base infrastructure footprint but is mandatory for 99.99% uptime SLAs.
2. Voice AI and NLU
Real-time speech processing (ASR/TTS) requires significant vCPU overhead and, in many cases, dedicated GPU resources for LLM inference.
3. Media Storage Retention
Recording 100% of interactions for long periods (years) creates a geometric increase in storage costs and requires high-performance S3-compatible object storage (MinIO/AWS S3).