What is an LLM gateway?
A centralized API and policy layer between applications and model providers that standardizes requests, authentication, routing, observability, safety, caching, and fallbacks.
Why is this important?
A gateway prevents every application from implementing provider clients, keys, logs, and policies independently.
How it works
Applications send a normalized request. The gateway authenticates, applies policy, routes or transforms, invokes a provider, streams results, records usage, and handles fallbacks.
Technical example
One internal endpoint serves Claude, GPT, Gemini, and private models while enforcing budgets, redaction, approved regions, and trace IDs.
Implementation notes
Preserve provider-specific capabilities, secure keys, isolate tenants, define retry safety, redact logs, measure first-token latency, and avoid caching sensitive prompts.
