CourseLarge Language Models: The Complete Course · Module 13: Deployment, Operations, and Economics · part 92 of 103
Part 92 · Module 13: Deployment, Operations, and Economics

Lesson 3: Keeping the assistant fast, up and affordable

24 min read·13 Oct 2026
Module 13 · Lesson 3 · About 50 minutes · Needs: Lesson 1 (the gateway), Module 2 Lesson 4 (pricing a call), Module 8 Lesson 2 (backoff with jitter); Module 10 Lesson 5 (the CI gate) helps

The situation

It is Monday 24 August 2026, week 13, 09:00 UTC. The queue opens and forty tickets arrive in a few seconds (simulated), all through Lesson 1's gateway. Tomasz watches the logs; Joel watches the bill.

You follow T-1001, Ana Duarte's duplicate charge of 288 USD, through four questions. How long may a call take? What if the provider says "too many requests", or is down? And how do you avoid paying twice for one answer, or for a runaway script?

40 tickets 09:00 UTC gateway Lesson 1 how long? latency too many? rate limits provider down? fallback what cost? cache, routing T-1001 among them
At 09:00 the gateway (blue, your system) meets four questions at once: how long a call may take, how much it may send, what if the provider is down (amber, uncertain), and what it costs.

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