Lilly Tech Systems
Designing AI Gateway & API Management
Build a centralized AI API gateway that routes requests across OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and local models — with rate limiting, cost controls, security, and caching. Learn the architecture patterns platform engineers use to manage AI API access for entire organizations.
Your Learning Path
Follow these lessons in order to design a complete AI gateway from scratch, or jump to any topic you need right now.
1. AI Gateway Architecture
Why you need an AI gateway, gateway components (routing, auth, rate limiting, logging), build vs buy decisions with LiteLLM and Portkey, and gateway vs direct API calls trade-offs.
2. Multi-Provider Routing
Load balancing across OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and local models. Fallback chains, latency-based and cost-based routing, model capability matching, and a production router implementation.
3. Rate Limiting & Quota Management
Per-user, per-team, and per-app rate limiting. Token-based quotas, burst handling, quota allocation strategies, and a production rate limiter with Redis.
4. Cost Control & Budgeting
Real-time cost tracking per request, department and project budgets, cost alerts, chargeback models, token optimization at the gateway level, and spending dashboards.
5. Security & Compliance
API key management, PII filtering at the gateway, audit logging, data residency routing, SOC2 and HIPAA compliance patterns, and request/response encryption.
6. Caching & Performance
Semantic caching, exact match caching, cache invalidation strategies, response streaming through the gateway, latency optimization, and cache hit rate monitoring.
7. Best Practices & Checklist
Gateway deployment checklist, migration from direct API calls, multi-region deployment patterns, and a comprehensive FAQ for platform engineers building AI gateways.
What You'll Learn
By the end of this course, you will be able to:
Design Gateway Architecture
Architect a centralized AI gateway that handles multi-provider routing, authentication, rate limiting, and observability for your entire organization.
Build Production Components
Implement routers, rate limiters, cost trackers, and caching layers in Python with Redis that you can deploy at work this week.
Control Costs & Compliance
Set up department budgets, enforce spending limits, filter PII from requests, and generate audit logs that satisfy SOC2 and HIPAA requirements.
Optimize Performance
Reduce latency and API costs by 30-60% with semantic caching, response streaming, and intelligent request deduplication at the gateway layer.