How do you isolate failures in a distributed LLMOps architecture?

Failure isolation in LLMOps is achieved using microservice boundaries, circuit breakers, fallback models, and request-level timeouts.

In distributed LLM systems, failures can occur in retrieval, embedding services, model inference, or post-processing. Isolation ensures that a failure in one component does not cascade. This is achieved using circuit breakers, bulkheads, retry policies, and strict timeouts. Each subsystem (RAG, inference, moderation) runs independently so degradation is localized instead of systemic.