Cohere Production Checklist

Overview

Complete go-live checklist for deploying Cohere API v2 integrations to production with safety gates, health checks, and rollback procedures.

Prerequisites

• Staging environment tested and verified
• Production API key (not trial) from dashboard.cohere.com
• Deployment pipeline configured
• Monitoring and alerting ready

Checklist

API & Authentication

• Using production API key (not trial — trial is rate-limited to 20 calls/min)
• CO_API_KEY stored in secret manager (Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, GCP Secret Manager)
• Key rotation procedure documented and tested
• Billing alerts configured at dashboard.cohere.com
• Using API v2 endpoints (CohereClientV2, not CohereClient)

Code Quality

• All API calls specify model parameter explicitly
• embeddingTypes set for all Embed calls (required for v3+)
• inputType set for all Embed calls (required for v3+)
• Error handling catches CohereError and CohereTimeoutError
• Retry logic with exponential backoff for 429 and 5xx
• No hardcoded API keys in source code
• Request/response logging excludes API keys and PII

Model Selection

• Correct model IDs used (not deprecated names):

Use Case	Recommended Model	Fallback
Chat/generation	command-a-03-2025	command-r-plus-08-2024
Lightweight chat	command-r7b-12-2024	command-r-08-2024
Embeddings	embed-v4.0	embed-english-v3.0
Reranking	rerank-v3.5	rerank-english-v3.0

Performance

• Embed calls batched (up to 96 texts per request)
• Rerank calls limited to 1000 documents per request
• Streaming enabled for user-facing chat (chatStream)
• Connection pooling / keep-alive configured
• Response caching for repeated embed/rerank queries
• maxTokens set to prevent runaway generation costs

Health Check Endpoint

// /api/health
import { CohereClientV2, CohereError } from 'cohere-ai';

const cohere = new CohereClientV2();

export async function GET() {
  const start = Date.now();
  let cohereStatus: 'healthy' | 'degraded' | 'down' = 'down';

  try {
    // Cheapest possible health check — minimal chat
    await cohere.chat({
      model: 'command-r7b-12-2024',
      messages: [{ role: 'user', content: 'ping' }],
      maxTokens: 1,
    });
    cohereStatus = 'healthy';
  } catch (err) {
    if (err instanceof CohereError && err.statusCode === 429) {
      cohereStatus = 'degraded'; // Rate limited but reachable
    }
  }

  return Response.json({
    status: cohereStatus === 'healthy' ? 'ok' : 'degraded',
    cohere: {
      status: cohereStatus,
      latencyMs: Date.now() - start,
    },
    timestamp: new Date().toISOString(),
  });
}

Circuit Breaker

class CohereCircuitBreaker {
  private failures = 0;
  private lastFailure = 0;
  private state: 'closed' | 'open' | 'half-open' = 'closed';

  constructor(
    private threshold = 5,
    private resetMs = 60_000
  ) {}

  async call<T>(fn: () => Promise<T>, fallback?: () => T): Promise<T> {
    if (this.state === 'open') {
      if (Date.now() - this.lastFailure > this.resetMs) {
        this.state = 'half-open';
      } else if (fallback) {
        return fallback();
      } else {
        throw new Error('Cohere circuit breaker is open');
      }
    }

    try {
      const result = await fn();
      this.failures = 0;
      this.state = 'closed';
      return result;
    } catch (err) {
      this.failures++;
      this.lastFailure = Date.now();

      if (this.failures >= this.threshold) {
        this.state = 'open';
        console.error(`Cohere circuit breaker OPEN after ${this.failures} failures`);
      }
      throw err;
    }
  }
}

const breaker = new CohereCircuitBreaker();

Gradual Rollout

# Pre-flight
curl -sf https://staging.example.com/api/health | jq '.cohere'
curl -s https://status.cohere.com/api/v2/status.json | jq '.status'

# Deploy with canary (10% traffic)
kubectl apply -f k8s/production.yaml
kubectl rollout pause deployment/app

# Monitor for 10 minutes: error rate, latency, 429s
# Check: No increase in CohereError rate
# Check: P95 latency < 5s for chat, < 500ms for embed/rerank

# Proceed to 100%
kubectl rollout resume deployment/app
kubectl rollout status deployment/app

Monitoring Alerts

Alert	Condition	Severity
Cohere unreachable	Health check fails 3x	P1
High error rate	5xx > 5% of requests/5min	P1
Rate limited	429 > 10/min	P2
High latency	Chat P95 > 10s	P2
Auth failure	Any 401 response	P1
Budget exceeded	Daily token cost > threshold	P2

Rollback

# Immediate rollback
kubectl rollout undo deployment/app
kubectl rollout status deployment/app

# Verify rollback
curl -sf https://api.example.com/api/health | jq '.cohere'

Output

• Production-ready Cohere integration with health checks
• Circuit breaker preventing cascade failures
• Monitoring alerts for Cohere-specific error conditions
• Documented rollback procedure

Resources

• Cohere Going Live Guide
• Cohere Status Page
• Cohere Pricing

Next Steps

For version upgrades, see cohere-upgrade-migration.