Traffic arrives in sharp bursts and your LLM p99 spikes each time. How do you absorb the bursts?
Autoscaling reacts in minutes, but a burst lands in seconds, and the gap is where your tail latency dies. Absorbing bursts is about buffers and shedding, not just adding replicas. Here is the playbook.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real GenAI, LLM, and AI/ML engineering interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
Autoscaling reacts in minutes, but a burst lands in seconds, and the gap is where your tail latency dies. Absorbing bursts is about buffers and shedding, not just adding replicas. Here is the playbook.
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.
