N-ATLaS is a multilingual African-language LLM we took from research to production on Kubernetes. This lightning talk shares the practical lessons from making it reproducible, observable, and affordable under real infrastructure constraints. I’ll cover the platform patterns that mattered most: Argo-based orchestration, repeatable deployment, observability, supply-chain hygiene, autoscaling, caching, and rollout strategies that improved latency, uptime, and cost. Rather than focusing on model theory, this talk is about operational reality, what broke, what worked, and what we would do differently after real usage. Attendees will leave with practical patterns for running LLM workloads in production, especially in resource-constrained environments and for low-resource languages