Performance2025.1111 min
A budget for latency
Tail latency is a design decision, not an accident. How to spend milliseconds deliberately across a request path.
Tail latency isn't something that happens after architecture. Architecture creates it.
Every network hop, database query, serialization step, and downstream dependency consumes part of the request's latency budget.
Spend milliseconds deliberately
A useful latency budget makes those tradeoffs visible before they become production incidents.