#resilience

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.

When demand exceeds capacity, you have three choices: crash, reject, or degrade. Graceful degradation keeps serving, just worse.

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