Published February 8, 2026 in inside saby
Designing LLM provider load balancing for agent workflows
Author: Marten Wiman
Agentic systems demand more than a single model endpoint. Reliable orchestration needs routing logic that balances quality, latency, and cost in real time.
1. Route by Workload Type
Instead of sending every request to the same model, classify workload intent first. Summarization, extraction, and reasoning tasks often perform best on different providers.
Intent-based routing reduces latency spikes and improves answer quality across mixed workloads.
2. Score Providers Continuously
Provider score should combine p95 latency, error rate, and token cost. A weighted scoring model allows real-time traffic shifts when one provider degrades.
- Update scores at short intervals to avoid stale routing decisions.
- Use health thresholds for automatic fallback and traffic draining.
- Store score history for incident post-mortems and tuning.
3. Add Prompt Cache and Replay
Caching normalized prompts handles repeated traffic efficiently and lowers costs. Replay queues absorb burst traffic during release windows.
Combined with smart TTL rules, cache hit rates can stay high without serving stale responses.
4. Enforce Operational Guardrails
Timeout envelopes, retry caps, and budget ceilings should be enforced before each dispatch. These controls prevent runaway costs and noisy-failure loops.
Treat guardrails as configuration, not code. Teams should tune them by environment safely.
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