Buyer's Guide

How to evaluate AI infrastructure

A vendor-neutral framework for regulated enterprises. Architecture, operational, commercial, and compliance criteria.

Use this framework to evaluate any AI infrastructure platform — including Huitzo. It names the questions that matter when sensitive data and regulatory regimes are in scope.

The five-step evaluation

  1. Step 1

    Define the workload boundary

    List the data the workload touches and the regulatory regime it sits under. This determines whether self-hosted AI is required or just preferred.

  2. Step 2

    List your model and integration constraints

    Which models can the team run? Which internal systems must the runtime reach? Capture both before evaluating any vendor.

  3. Step 3

    Evaluate vendors against architecture criteria

    Where does data sit at rest and in flight? Is the runtime portable across environments? Can the customer swap models without changing applications?

  4. Step 4

    Evaluate operational and commercial criteria

    Deployment time, on-call ownership, upgrade cadence, version pinning, exit clauses, support tiers, professional-services scope.

  5. Step 5

    Score against compliance posture

    What does the vendor claim today? What is the customer's deployment expected to provide? Document both — vendor claims and customer obligations.

Buyer's guide questions

Is this guide neutral or a Huitzo sales doc?
The framework is vendor-neutral. Where Huitzo scores poorly today (no SOC 2, no GA), we say so. Use it to evaluate any AI infrastructure platform.
Where should compliance evidence come from?
From third-party audits and from the vendor's explicit "what we do not claim" page. A vendor without one of those is a yellow flag.