SmartRouter — One API for All AI Models

When your AI feature goes down, your users do not care that OpenAI had an outage. They care that your product is broken. Multi-provider failover is the single most impactful reliability investment you can make.

The Failure Modes

LLM APIs fail in predictable ways:

• **Provider outage**: Complete service unavailability (5-10 times/year per major provider)
• **Rate limiting**: 429 errors when exceeding tier limits
• **Model deprecation**: Provider retires a model your code depends on
• **Latency spikes**: Response times jump from 2s to 30s during peak load

5. Content filtering: False positive safety filters block legitimate requests

The Failover Architecture

```

Request → Router → [Primary Provider]

↓ (failure detected)

[Fallback 1]

↓ (failure detected)

[Fallback 2]

```

Key design decisions:

Timeout strategy: Set aggressive timeouts (5s for streaming, 15s for completions). Failing fast is better than making users wait.

Circuit breaker pattern: If a provider returns 3 consecutive errors, stop routing to it for 30 seconds. This prevents cascading failures and gives the provider time to recover.

Health checks: Continuously probe each provider with a lightweight request. If response time exceeds 2x the baseline, mark the provider as degraded and reduce traffic.

Graceful degradation: If all providers are down, return a cached response or a friendly error message. Never show the user a raw 500 error.

Implementation

Building this yourself requires a stateful router with health checking, circuit breaking, and retry logic. Most teams spend 3-6 weeks on the initial implementation and 2-4 hours/week on maintenance.

SmartRouter provides all of this out of the box. It is an OpenAI-compatible API gateway with built-in multi-provider failover, health checks, and circuit breaking. Switch your endpoint and get zero-downtime AI: https://smartrouter.online

Try SmartRouter free — 50+ models, one OpenAI-compatible API. Auto-routing, failover, cost optimization.

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