Making the AI Gateway Resilient to Redis Failures
Last Updated: April 2026
Enterprise AI Gateway deployments put Redis in the hot path for nearly every request: rate limiting, cache lookups, spend tracking. When Redis is healthy, the latency contribution is single-digit milliseconds — invisible to end users. When it degrades, a production AI Gateway needs to stay up regardless.
Running LiteLLM at scale across 100+ pods means designing for failure modes before they appear. The easy case is Redis going fully down: fail fast, fall through to the database, continue serving requests. The hard case — the one that takes down gateways — is a slow Redis: still accepting connections, still responding, but timing out after 20-30 seconds per operation.