You need to run a model over 200 million documents. How do you design that, and what does it cost?

Nobody is waiting, which changes every constraint. Latency stops mattering, throughput per dollar becomes the only metric, and the design converges on something that looks like a data pipeline rather than a service.

Grounded in researched DevOps, SRE and platform engineering interview loops, written to a senior-engineer editorial bar, and never padded to hit a word count.