#operations

Your primary API will fail. Same model at different provider. Smaller model as backup. Cached responses for emergencies. Have a plan before you need it.

Latency, errors, throughput, cost. The four numbers that tell you if your LLM system is healthy or heading for an incident.

One runaway bug can burn $50K in a weekend. Rate limits aren't just for abuse prevention. They're your circuit breaker.

Models change. Prompts change. How do you update without breaking clients? Immutable versions and controlled rollout.

The gap between 'works on my laptop' and 'survives production' is filled with timeouts, retries, fallbacks, and rate limits. Here's the checklist.

Egress $3K, logging $2K, on-call eng time $8K—the costs nobody budgeted for add up to more than you expect.

Your API has rate limits. Your database has connection limits. Your LLM endpoints should have token limits. Here's how to add them without breaking production.