Retrieval Augmented Generation with Vertex AI and Go

I am building a Go-based Hotel Reviews RAG system with Vertex AI Vector Search, BigQuery and Gemini. This post will describe some MLops, AI Text models, and overall working with Google Cloud platform’s latest Generative AI and Machine Learning tools. I will walk you through the process of setting up an end-to-end Retrieval Augmented Generation system with Vertex AI Vector Search. The project is called Alpaca which is my Hotel Review Search turbocharged with AI. End goal: finding quality hotels that meet your criteria based on natural language analysis and a fine-tuned curation of LLMs, Vector Similarity Search, and the related APIs. My preliminary research shows that it is possible to do better than a raw ChatGPT/Grok/Gemini/Llama question and answer prompt. ...

March 14, 2026 · Eric Arellano

Web scraping TripAdvisor Hotel Reviews with Go Colly and Applescript

The goal is to gather as many real Hotel reviews as possible to process them into vector embeddings and run similarity searches with RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation). The resulting matched reviews will be combined as input prompts for the Generative AI (GenAI) LLM model such as Gemini, Grok, Claude, or ChatGPT. This will allows us to find the best hotels in any given city. The Hotel Assistant will return results based on custom criteria or a user question. ...

March 3, 2026 · Eric Arellano

Alpaca - Hotel Quality Recommendations

A comprehensive Go microservice that fetches, consolidates, and analyzes hotel data from multiple sources. Features multi-source data aggregation, Retrieval Augmented Generation based recommendation engine with cutting edge LLMs. Status: In active development. URL: Not yet public. Architecture Alpaca is a microservice and utility suite that: Fetches hotel data from multiple sources (Amadeus, Expedia, Tripadvisor, Google, Booking.com) Consolidates hotel data into a unified schema Crawls reviews from multiple sources (Tripadvisor, Google, Expedia, Booking, hotel websites, etc.) Vectorizes reviews and hotel data into RAG capable vector database. Uses LLM (GPT-4, Claude, Grok) to analyze reviews for Quality and Quiet Generates intelligent recommendations based on review analysis Stores data in SQLite (default) with raw SQL Uses a generalized provider interface for easy API integration Processes data in concurrent batches with rate limiting Github Repo ...

February 21, 2026 · Eric Arellano

Building a Modern Application on AWS EKS with Pulumi: A Practical Journey

Building a Modern Application on AWS EKS with Pulumi: A Practical Journey The application leverages PostgreSQL for data persistence, Kafka for event streaming, and a mix of Go, Python, and JavaScript components, all deployed on AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) using Pulumi in Go. The cluster runs in private subnets with VPC endpoints for a fully isolated setup. The Go Code: Precision in Pulumi The backbone of our infrastructure is a meticulously structured Go program using the Pulumi AWS and EKS SDKs (github.com/pulumi/pulumi-aws/sdk/v6/go/aws and github.com/pulumi/pulumi-eks/sdk/v1/go/eks). We defined a VPC with private subnets using aws.ec2.Vpc and aws.ec2.Subnet, ensuring each subnet has a dedicated route table created via aws.ec2.RouteTable and associated with aws.ec2.RouteTableAssociation. This setup isolates traffic, with privateSubnets passed as a pulumi.StringArrayOutput to the EKS cluster for node placement. ...

January 10, 2026 · Eric Arellano