> The Gemini API will randomly fail about 1% of the time, retry logic is basically mandatory.

That is sadly true across the board for AI inference API providers. OpenAI and Anthropic API stability usually suffers around launch events. Azure OpenAI/Foundry serving regularly has 500 errors for certain time periods.

For any production feature with high uptime guarantees I would right now strongly advise for picking a model you can get from multiple providers and having failover between clouds.