Google Cloud NEXT '26 Just Changed How I Think About Real-Time Pricing APIs

I've been building Pricing APIs for years. And if you've ever built one — a real one, one that has to serve millions of customers, react to stock levels, competitor moves, time of day, demand surges, and promotional calendars — you know the dirty secret at the heart of most of them. They're not really real-time. They're very fast batch jobs wearing a real-time costume. You precompute prices on a schedule. You cache aggressively. You serve stale data with enough confidence that most customers nev