Why Inference Latency, Availability Drift | CoreWeave Blog

What this post added

This post details the causes and measurement strategies for inference latency and availability drift in production. It identifies three primary sources of latency drift: infrastructure-layer variability, model-serving configuration drift (batching, KV cache pressure), and traffic pattern mismatch. It also explains how availability degrades through autoscaling lag, request shape mismatches, and stale cache behavior. The post emphasizes the need to measure metrics like p99 latency, TTFT, goodput, error budget consumption, autoscaling lag, and timeout rates under load to diagnose and prevent these issues, which often go unnoticed by standard monitoring.