2025 was our biggest year yet for enterprise deployments into customer VPCs. Every single one taught us something about what actually breaks in production. Here are five of the most impactful lessons our Field Engineering team learned this past year:
1. Environment volatility isn't an edge case—it's the default. Proxy servers silently intercept traffic. Custom certificate authorities break TLS handshakes. API calls vanish into black holes. We stopped treating these as surprises and built pre-deployment validation tools that catch them before the first container even spins up.
2. Configuration shouldn’t require a "tear down." In the early days, changing a single parameter meant rebuilding the stack. Working in diverse customer environments taught us that adaptability can’t be an afterthought. Now, we build runtime configurability into the platform from day one, allowing us to adjust critical settings on the fly without downtime.
3. Answers are needed in minutes, not hours. Debugging in a customer's VPC with limited access is a high-pressure exercise. To solve this, we built AI-powered log analyzers that surface root causes instantly. What used to take half a day of manual digging now takes minutes.
4. Documentation is its own product. Our runbooks aren't written in a vacuum; they are forged from support tickets and troubleshooting sessions. By sharing these "living documents" with customers, we empower their teams to handle routine issues independently, reserving our engineering syncs for genuinely new challenges.
5. On-prem isn't always the answer. This year, we saw a shift: many teams (especially those already utilizing Snowflake or Splunk) wanted enterprise-grade security without the overhead of managing the infrastructure. In response, we built Dedicated Instances (DI). DIs provide a fully managed, isolated environment with complete network separation, offering the security of on-prem with none of the environmental volatility.
Deploying into customer environments is an exercise in humility. You can't anticipate every variable, but you can build systems that adapt to the reality of enterprise environments. Reflecting on the past three years, it’s clear why the demand for on prem deployment is skyrocketing. The GenAI ecosystem grew up around incredible open-source tools—Unstructured, Weaviate, Chroma, LlamaIndex, LangChain, Crew AI, etc—that are easy to run on prem. However, as builders graduate these prototypes into production, they hit the "Enterprise Wall": friction with internal infra teams, security audits, and complex networking. At Unstructured, we’ve realized that success doesn’t come from a great product alone; it comes from being the partner that helps builders navigate those wickets and move to production at speed.