Providers, failover, security, multi-tenancy, and observability

Overview

• Provider failover chooses an allowed alternative after eligible failure.
• Multi-tenancy scopes records and operations; security enforces trust boundaries.
• Observability connects execution paths to their outcomes and resource costs.

Why this matters

Provider outages must not trigger privacy violations or leave uncertain business actions hidden.

An everyday example

A company uses a preapproved backup supplier and keeps each customer's records separate.

A technical example

Model failure uses a verified-status template; tool timeout checks the receipt ledger before any retry.

How it works

1. Derive principal
2. Select permitted route
3. Enforce resource limits
4. Trace calls
5. Validate outcome
6. Fail over/degrade under policy
7. Reconcile unknown writes.

Architecture and flow

Authorized task → policy route → provider/tools → validated outcome → trace + audit.

The insurance assistant example

Chat continues with a factual status template when generation is unavailable; new claim writes remain durable and deduplicated.

When to use it

All multi-user production applications and client deployments.

When to avoid it

Never trade away region restrictions, tool semantics, or schema capability merely to return some answer.

Interview answer

“Failover preserves data and quality contracts. Business receipts, tenant controls, and correlated traces remain consistent across model routes.”

Benefits, trade-offs, and production considerations

Test partial outages, shared quotas, revoked access, degraded search, and telemetry failures. Set budgets per task/tenant and alert on run amplification.