Welcome to LLM Gateway & Proxy Beginner

As enterprises adopt multiple LLM providers and models, managing direct API connections from every application becomes unsustainable. An LLM gateway provides a unified access layer with centralized control over authentication, routing, cost management, and monitoring.

Why an LLM Gateway?

• Without a gateway, every application team manages their own API keys, implements their own retry logic, and has no visibility into organization-wide LLM usage and costs.
• An LLM gateway centralizes: API key management, request routing, rate limiting, cost tracking, usage analytics, and compliance enforcement.

Key Capabilities

• Unified API: One API interface that routes to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Azure, AWS, and self-hosted models
• Authentication: Centralized API key management with per-team/per-project keys and permissions
• Cost Control: Budget limits, cost allocation by team/project, and usage alerts
• Reliability: Automatic failover between providers, retry logic, and request queuing
• Observability: Centralized logging, metrics, and analytics for all LLM requests

Architecture Overview

The gateway sits between your applications and LLM providers. Applications send requests to the gateway using a standard API format. The gateway authenticates, routes, transforms, and forwards requests to the appropriate provider.