Agent Reliability and Resilience: Building Fault-Tolerant Systems
Production agents must handle failures gracefully. This guide covers reliability patterns—circuit breakers, timeouts, retries, fallbacks—that make agents resilient to API failures, network issues, and unexpected conditions.
Circuit Breaker Pattern
Prevent Cascade Failures
Timeout Strategy
Don't wait forever for responses:
Timeout Hierarchy
| Operation | Timeout |
|---|---|
| LLM call | 30s |
| Database query | 5s |
| API call | 10s |
| Total request | 60s |
Retry Logic
Smart Retry Strategy
- • Retry transient errors (network, timeout)
- • Don't retry permanent errors (invalid input)
- • Exponential backoff: 1s, 2s, 4s, 8s...
- • Max 3 retries before giving up
- • Add jitter to prevent thundering herd
Fallback Strategies
Graceful Degradation
Self-Healing Patterns
Agents that recover automatically:
- • Detect degraded performance → Switch to backup
- • Connection lost → Reconnect automatically
- • State corrupted → Restore from checkpoint
- • Memory full → Archive old data
Health Checks
Monitor Agent Health
- Response time < 2s
- Success rate > 99%
- Memory usage < 80%
- Response time > 10s
- Success rate < 95%
- Memory usage > 95%
Conclusion
Reliability and resilience separate prototypes from production systems. Implement circuit breakers, timeouts, retries, and fallbacks to build agents that handle the chaos of real-world operations gracefully.
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