🔄 All Your API Proxies Just Went Down — Multi-Model Emergency Failover

It Will Happen

API proxies go down. Providers have outages. Rate limits hit at the worst times. If your production system depends on a single AI endpoint, that single point of failure will eventually bite you.

The Architecture: Provider Abstraction Layer

Your application code should never know which specific API endpoint it's talking to. It talks to an abstraction layer that decides which backend to use. Switching backends is a config change, not a code change.

Failover Tiers

1. Primary: Main cloud API (best quality)
2. Secondary: Alternate provider with equivalent quality
3. Tertiary: Local inference on our Mac Studio cluster (slower, always available)

The local cluster as tier 3 is the key piece. Even when all external APIs are down, we keep running.

Switching Procedure

1. Check the provider's status page — is this transient or extended?
2. If extended: update model config, restart gateway using the restart script
3. Verify first few responses come from the new provider
4. Log the switch with timestamp for cost tracking

Key insight: Most outages are shorter than you think. For a 10-minute brownout, the switching procedure itself takes 5-10 minutes — sometimes waiting is the right call.