What is model cold-start / warmup in serving, and how do you handle it for autoscaling?
A newly booted replica is sluggish on its opening requests while weights load and kernels compile, which fights with reactive autoscaling. The signal is identifying where cold start comes from plus the warmup and provisioning remedies.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real GenAI, LLM, and AI/ML engineering interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
A newly booted replica is sluggish on its opening requests while weights load and kernels compile, which fights with reactive autoscaling. The signal is identifying where cold start comes from plus the warmup and provisioning remedies.
Lead with where the obvious approach breaks, because that is the judgment they are screening for — most candidates jump straight to the happy path and lose the room.
Then walk the failure back through the pipeline in order, naming the one metric the customer's exec sponsor actually cares about before you propose the fix.
