Practices for embedding AI agents into enterprise systems [Circuit Breaker + Model Fallback] 💡 LLM providers go down. Are you designing for that reality? Circuit breakers and fallback models structurally eliminate single points of failure. 🔥 Problems solved - LLM provider outages or maintenance cause complete agent downtime - Retry storms against a failing provider compound system-wide load - Single-provider dependency becomes an availability risk for all agents 🏗️ Proposed pattern When the primary model's error rate or latency exceeds thresholds, automatically switch to a secondary model on a different provider or region. If the secondary is also unavailable, return degraded responses from cache or a "currently unavailable" message. The circuit breaker (Open/Half-Open/Closed states) prevents request floods during outages. After recovery, traffic gradually shifts back to the primary through a Half-Open state. Embed this logic in the AI gateway to avoid duplicating it across individual applications. ✅ Selection criteria - Use when: All production environments (LLM availability variance is a given) - Skip when: No exceptions -- apply by default for production workloads ⚠️ Pitfalls - Overly generous timeouts cause user abandonment and resource exhaustion - Retrying side-effecting operations without idempotency keys risks duplicate execution - Failing to eval the fallback model beforehand means quality drops go unnoticed after switchover 🛠️ Implementation Approach 1. Introduce a multi-provider abstraction layer (LiteLLM / Portkey) to decouple primary/secondary model switching from application code 2. Embed a circuit breaker (resilience4j / Polly) in the AI gateway with error rate and latency thresholds (start at 2-3x P99) for automatic Open/Half-Open/Closed state transitions 3. Pre-validate fallback model quality against eval datasets and confirm acceptable performance before registering as a fallback target 4. Attach idempotency keys to side-effecting operations to prevent duplicate execution on retries 5. Set up health check endpoints and use Half-Open state to gradually shift traffic back to the primary after recovery is detected #AIAgents# #EnterpriseArchitecture#