LLM reliability and failover engineering
Eliminate rate-limit crashes, model downtime and flaky socket drops, stress-tested with the Hiccup chaos engine.
What you get
AI apps depend on providers that fail some of the time. These are the parts that keep yours answering.
- Multi-model fallback cascades
- When one provider is slow or down, the request moves to the next: Gemini, OpenAI or Anthropic.
- Retry budgets and circuit breakers
- Exponential backoff with a retry limit, and breakers that stop sending traffic to a service that keeps failing.
- A chaos testing suite
- Simulated slow responses, random 500s, dropped sockets and jitter, so failures are found before users find them.
- Latency tuning
- Work aimed at a sub-500ms time-to-first-token.
How it works
Four moves, from brief to production- i.
Scope
Tell me where your AI app breaks today. You get a scope and timeline estimate, with a direct reply within 12 hours.
- ii.
Architect
Fallback order, timeouts, retry budgets and breakers are planned before the first line of code is written.
- iii.
Ship
The cascade and the retry logic go live behind a single function, with the chaos suite alongside.
- iv.
Harden
Token budgets, observability and repeat chaos runs show how the system behaves when a provider does not.
Related work
Built and live todayThe Honey outage demo
Pick an outage and watch the reply move down a Workers AI, Groq and Gemini cascade.
Hiccup, a chaos endpoint
An endpoint that misbehaves on purpose: slow responses, random 500s, dropped sockets and jitter.
LLM provider failover, explained
Cascades, timeouts, retry budgets and circuit breakers, with a code sketch.
Questions people ask
- What is an LLM fallback cascade?
- An ordered list of model providers. A request goes to the first; if it times out, is rate-limited or errors, it moves to the next, so users still get an answer.
- What is a circuit breaker?
- A pattern that stops sending requests to a service that keeps failing, for a short cooldown, so users do not wait on timeouts you already expect and the service has room to recover.
- How do you test reliability?
- By simulating failures on purpose: slow responses, random 500s, dropped connections and jitter. Hiccup is an endpoint built to do exactly that.
- How long does reliability work take?
- Typically 1–2 weeks, depending on how many providers and request paths are involved.
- Can you add this to an app that already exists?
- Yes. The cascade sits behind a single function, so it can be introduced to an existing app without rewriting the rest of it.
Is your AI app one outage away from down?
Use the scope estimator for an instant timeline, or send a brief. You get a direct reply within 12 hours.