Building an Enterprise Chatbot: React, FastAPI, and WebSocket Architecture
Every enterprise wants an AI chatbot now. Most of the tutorials out there will get you a working prototype in an afternoon. Deploying that prototype to production for a Fortune 500 client with 10,000 concurrent users, strict data isolation requirements, and a CFO watching the LLM API bill? That is a different engineering problem entirely. I have built and operated chatbot systems at this scale across regulated industries (healthcare, financial services, government), and the gap between "it works on my laptop" and "it handles production load without bleeding money" is enormous. This article covers the architecture I have landed on after iterating through several generations of enterprise chatbot deployments: React on the frontend, FastAPI on the backend, WebSockets for real-time communication, and a layered storage and caching strategy that keeps costs sane.