Advanced Itinerary: Building a Compute‑Adjacent Cache for LLMs — Operational Playbook (2026)

Advanced Itinerary: Building a Compute‑Adjacent Cache for LLMs — Operational Playbook (2026)

Hook: You’ve proven the concept of a cache. Now scale it. This advanced guide provides runbooks, SLOs, and multi‑region scaling patterns to operate compute‑adjacent caches reliably in 2026.

Operational objectives

The cache must deliver:

• Consistent P99 latency across regions
• Budget predictability for token and network cost
• Policy compliance for cached user data

Runbook excerpts

Cache failover drill

1. Detect increased miss rate and rising P99 latency.
2. Scale L0 capacity for affected nodes, then isolate node with anomalies.
3. Redirect a small fraction of traffic to secondary regional cache and monitor regressions.
4. If regressions persist, progressively shift traffic to origin while triggering an automated rollback window.

Cost spike investigation

1. Correlate cache miss growth with upstream egress and token cost.
2. Identify churn causes (e.g., model change, prompt format change) and patch prefetch rules.
3. File a post‑mortem and update prefetch model parameters.

SLOs and observability

Critical SLOs include:

• P95/P99 latency targets
• Cache hit ratio by model and tenant
• Cost per million tokens served

Governance

Automated approval flows reduce lead times for policy changes. Link approvals with documented decision models. For inspiration on approval workflows and automation, see approval.top.

Privacy and policy

Caches are ephemeral storage of user‑sensitive material and must respect deletion and retention requests. Consult legal resources such as caches.link and ensure integrated contact lists for incident notifications are kept current (contact.top).

Scaling pattern

Use a mesh of regional caches with consistent hashing and adaptive prefetching. Expect autonomous agents to tune TTLs within controlled guardrails by 2027.

Further reading

For the foundational compute‑adjacent cache framework, read cached.space. To understand financial governance and budgeting choices during scale, review leaders.top.

Closing

Scale with guardrails. Advanced caches require close coupling of observability, governance, and automated decisioning. The teams that win in 2026 automate the routine and surface the exceptional for human decisions.