The original title is: "LLM Failover Isn't Just a Backup Model: Retry, Fallback, Cache, and Semantic Routing"

Short summary

A detailed breakdown of five LLM failover patterns—retry, fallback routing, load balancing, caching, and semantic routing—and why a single backup model is insufficient for production. The article highlights the model-context problem: switching between OpenAI and Anthropic APIs can silently break system prompts, tool schemas, JSON formatting, and streaming behavior. Includes a practical checklist for evaluating AI gateways and mentions GonkaRouter as an example endpoint.

• •Five failover patterns (retry, fallback, load balancing, caching, semantic routing) each address different failure modes
• •Model context differences between OpenAI and Anthropic APIs can silently break fallback behavior
• •Production checklist: define behavior for timeout/5xx/429/invalid JSON, use bounded retries, validate output before downstream use

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.