Implement resilient LLM provider pool
System Design Task: Resilient Multi-Provider LLM Client Library
Context
You are tasked with designing a client library for backend services. This library will be responsible for making calls to external Large Language Model (LLM) providers (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic). The core function of this library is to intelligently route requests across multiple LLM providers to achieve several critical objectives: maximizing availability, controlling operational costs, and consistently meeting defined latency Service Level Objectives (SLOs).
Requirements
- Provider Management
- Implement mechanisms for registering and unregistering LLM providers.
- Map and manage provider capabilities, including available models, maximum context length, and supported features (e.g., streaming, function calling, JSON mode).
- Governance
- Enforce per-provider rate limiting, extending to per-API key limits where applicable.
- Manage quotas across different dimensions: per provider, per model, and per tenant.
- Resilience
- Incorporate active and passive health checks for providers.
- Implement various timeouts: connection timeouts, request timeouts, and total request timeouts.
- Utilize circuit breakers with fail-fast behavior and half-open probes to prevent cascading failures.
- Routing
- Develop a load balancing strategy that is aware of both cost and latency.
- Design a retry and fallback mechanism that can switch between providers when one is degraded or completely down.
- Observability
- Ensure comprehensive observability through metrics, structured logs, and distributed tracing.
- Security
- Implement secure key management, covering aspects like storage, rotation, scoping, and redaction of API keys.
- Concurrency
- The library must be thread-safe, support high-throughput, handle parallel requests, and accommodate streaming responses.
Deliverables
- Describe the interfaces and data structures.
- Explain the request routing, failure handling, and concurrency strategies.
- State any necessary assumptions.
AI interview prep
Core dilemma
Balancing the dynamic, real-time optimization of cost, latency, and availability across heterogeneous external LLM providers, while maintaining robust resilience and strict governance within a high-throughput, thread-safe client library.
3 tradeoffs and 3 stress tests locked
Interview prep
Unlock the interviewer X-Ray rubric, tradeoff matrix, stress tests, clarifying questions, and key concepts.
Implement resilient LLM provider pool
System Design Task: Resilient Multi-Provider LLM Client Library
Context
You are tasked with designing a client library for backend services. This library will be responsible for making calls to external Large Language Model (LLM) providers (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic). The core function of this library is to intelligently route requests across multiple LLM providers to achieve several critical objectives: maximizing availability, controlling operational costs, and consistently meeting defined latency Service Level Objectives (SLOs).
Requirements
- Provider Management
- Implement mechanisms for registering and unregistering LLM providers.
- Map and manage provider capabilities, including available models, maximum context length, and supported features (e.g., streaming, function calling, JSON mode).
- Governance
- Enforce per-provider rate limiting, extending to per-API key limits where applicable.
- Manage quotas across different dimensions: per provider, per model, and per tenant.
- Resilience
- Incorporate active and passive health checks for providers.
- Implement various timeouts: connection timeouts, request timeouts, and total request timeouts.
- Utilize circuit breakers with fail-fast behavior and half-open probes to prevent cascading failures.
- Routing
- Develop a load balancing strategy that is aware of both cost and latency.
- Design a retry and fallback mechanism that can switch between providers when one is degraded or completely down.
- Observability
- Ensure comprehensive observability through metrics, structured logs, and distributed tracing.
- Security
- Implement secure key management, covering aspects like storage, rotation, scoping, and redaction of API keys.
- Concurrency
- The library must be thread-safe, support high-throughput, handle parallel requests, and accommodate streaming responses.
Deliverables
- Describe the interfaces and data structures.
- Explain the request routing, failure handling, and concurrency strategies.
- State any necessary assumptions.