Technical Sharing
AI System Reliability Engineering: Cutting Downtime Costs with Circuit Breakers, Fallbacks, and Retries
AI systems place their least stable link—the LLM and external APIs—on the critical path, and rate limits, timeouts, and failures happen every month. Waiting to react until something breaks means the downtime cost is already sunk. This article starts from the business lens of downtime cost and explains how circuit breakers, fallbacks, and retries chain together so the system holds up automatically instead of collapsing when a dependency fails.