API Failover
API failover is automatically redirecting traffic from a failing primary service to a healthy backup, such as a secondary region, an alternative provider, or a cached response. Failover keeps applications available when a dependency experiences an outage.
Technical Architecture & Deep-Dive
Failover requires detecting failure through health checks, error rates, or timeouts, and having a viable alternative ready. For AI features, this might mean switching from one model provider to another. For data, it might mean a replica region or cached snapshot.
Edge gateways can perform failover per request, retrying against a backup within milliseconds, so clients never see the primary outage.
Key Architectural Benefits
Implement API Failover at the Edge
Deploy lightweight API aggregation, edge caching, and secret injection in minutes without Docker containers or complex servers.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q:What is the difference between failover and load balancing?
Load balancing spreads traffic across healthy backends continuously. Failover shifts traffic to a backup only when the primary fails.
Related Architecture Concepts
API health checks are lightweight endpoints or probes that report whether a service is functioning. Monitors, load balancers, and gateways call them regularly, and unhealthy responses trigger alerts, traffic rerouting, or automated recovery.
The Circuit Breaker pattern is a software resiliency design that monitors upstream service health and temporarily halts requests to failing endpoints. By failing fast and returning cached fallback data, it prevents cascading system outages and reduces recovery time.
Graceful degradation is designing systems to keep providing core functionality when some components fail. For aggregated APIs, it means returning the data that succeeded, with optional sections omitted or replaced by cached values, rather than failing the entire response.