Envoy AI Gateway

Envoy AI Gateway is an open-source project built upon the robust foundation of Envoy Proxy, specifically engineered to simplify and standardize how your application clients interact with Generative AI (GenAI) services. It addresses the growing complexity of LLM integration by providing a secure, scalable, and efficient unified layer for routing, managing, and applying policy control to all your AI traffic. For enterprises scaling their GenAI usage, this gateway ensures operational excellence, resilient connectivity, and comprehensive observability.

Key Features

Envoy AI Gateway provides the critical control plane necessary for managing diverse AI infrastructure, ensuring security and optimizing operational costs.

• 🌐 Extensive LLM Provider Integration: Instantly route traffic to a wide array of LLM providers—including OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS Bedrock, Google Gemini, Mistral, and many others (17 providers supported out-of-the-box). This capability allows you to maintain high availability and flexibility by reducing vendor lock-in and enabling dynamic routing based on performance or cost factors.
• 🛡️ Enterprise-Grade Security and Authorization: Implement robust security controls, including fine-grained access policies, authorization, and secure egress connections to external providers. Crucially, the gateway supports Upstream Authentication, ensuring that traffic leaving your network for external LLM services is always secure and properly authorized.
• 📈 Comprehensive Observability and Cost Management: Gain deep visibility into your GenAI usage patterns, performance metrics, and consumption costs. This essential feature enables organizations to monitor service quality, identify underperforming models, and optimize resource allocation for significant cost savings.
• ⚙️ Resilient Connectivity with Automatic Failover: Ensure high availability across your AI infrastructure, whether you use external providers or self-hosted models. The gateway intelligently manages traffic flow, supporting automatic failover mechanisms to maintain service continuity even if a primary LLM service experiences degradation or downtime.
• 🚦 Policy Framework and Rate Limiting: Implement usage limiting and quality-of-service policies directly at the gateway layer. Apply global and fine-grained rate limiting to protect backend services from overload, manage costs, and ensure equitable access to expensive AI resources across different teams or applications.

Use Cases

The versatility of the Envoy AI Gateway makes it indispensable for organizations focused on secure, scalable AI integration.

1. Optimizing Multi-Cloud LLM Deployments: You operate applications that must leverage specialized models hosted by different providers (e.g., Google for specific analytics, OpenAI for creative tasks). You deploy Envoy AI Gateway as a unified routing layer, allowing applications to use a single endpoint while the gateway dynamically routes requests, applies provider-specific authentication, and ensures automatic failover if one provider becomes temporarily unavailable.
2. Securing Egress Traffic for Corporate Applications: Your internal applications require strict security and compliance when communicating with external GenAI services. You utilize the gateway's Upstream Authentication feature to centralize and enforce secure, authorized communication channels, preventing unauthorized data leakage and ensuring all external AI interactions adhere to enterprise security policies.
3. Cost and Usage Control for Internal Teams: You need to manage budget allocation for AI usage across several internal development teams. By implementing the gateway's policy framework and rate limiting, you can set specific usage quotas per team or application, gaining granular control over consumption and leveraging observability data to accurately charge back usage costs.

Why Choose Envoy AI Gateway?

Choosing Envoy AI Gateway means adopting a solution built for the complexity and scale of modern enterprise GenAI integration, leveraging battle-tested technology while remaining open and adaptable.

• A Proven, Reliable Foundation: The gateway is built on Envoy Proxy, a high-performance, production-ready technology relied upon by major enterprises globally for complex traffic handling. This ensures operational stability and performance right out of the box.
• Decoupled Architecture for Flexibility: The project utilizes a powerful Two-Tier Gateway Pattern. The Tier One Gateway acts as a centralized entry point for global policies and authentication, while the Tier Two Gateway offers fine-grained control and inference optimization specifically for self-hosted model serving clusters. This separation provides superior flexibility for hybrid AI infrastructure.
• Community-Driven Innovation: As an open-source project, the Envoy AI Gateway benefits from the continuous contributions and real-world experience of the broader Envoy community, ensuring that its features rapidly evolve to meet the latest GenAI routing and quality-of-service demands.

Conclusion

The Envoy AI Gateway provides the standardized, secure, and resilient traffic management solution essential for integrating Generative AI at an enterprise scale. By centralizing connectivity, enforcing strong security policies, and providing deep observability, it transforms the complexity of LLM integration into a scalable, operationally excellent process.