Operations Guide
AI API Error Handling and Rate Limiting Strategy for Production
Production-ready error handling for AI APIs: rate limit handling, exponential backoff, timeout management, comprehensive error catalog, and client-side rate limiting strategy.
Implementation Steps
- Implement exponential backoff for rate limit responses (provider throttling).
- Set timeout thresholds: connection timeout 5s, response timeout 30s.
- Create error catalog covering all known error codes with retry eligibility.
- Implement client-side sliding window rate limiter to prevent burst traffic.
- Configure error rate alerts: >5% error rate, >1% timeout rate trigger PagerDuty.
- Design graceful degradation: fallback responses, circuit breaker pattern.
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- Provider and model split recommendations
- Budget guardrail design by traffic stage
- KPI plan for spend, quality, and conversion