Why did one day of AI cost more than a month of servers?
Summary
The article investigates how a single day of AI usage can dwarf an entire month of server costs, attributing it to a retry storm caused by non-idempotent batch processing and a misordered deployment that writes the wrong data. It highlights the dangers of automated retries and non-idempotent workflows, offering practical lessons on ensuring idempotency, setting retry ceilings, and deploying migrations before code.