Docker Containers Don’t Know Your Model Is Still Loading
It was a Friday at 4:50 pm, the worst possible time for anything to go sideways when marketing flipped on a new AI summarization feature for the whole user base instead of the 5% rollout we'd agreed on. Traffic to our LLM service doubled in about four minutes. The autoscaler did exactly what it was told: it spun up three new replicas. What it didn't account for is that each replica needed almost three minutes just to pull a 14GB checkpoint and warm up CUDA kernels before it could answer a single

