Mon, Dec 7, 2026 · 11:00 PM – 11:25 PM
Serving a model from Frankfurt to a user in Lisbon spends milliseconds before the first token exists, and most reference architectures assume that cost away. This talk walks through moving a production inference path onto EU-only capacity: where the region boundaries actually fall, what data residency does to a caching layer designed without it, and which optimizations paid for their operational cost. We cover routing across three regions, speculative decoding on smaller hardware, and the degradation path that keeps a page usable while one region is unhealthy. Every number comes off a live service, including the migration week where p99 got worse before it got better and the rollback plan we spent two days writing and never used.